Is it okay to use real people as characters in your stories?
This wasn’t an issue for me when I wrote the stories; I didn’t know then I would fall in love with them and want to publish them.
But when I made the decision to publish the collection, I had to give some hard thought to what it meant to use real people in my fiction. I am not so much worried about legal danger, but I struggle with a few ethical questions.
Like any writer, I use real people from my life as inspiration. I’m not at all concerned about these inspirations. I have obscured their identities for people who don’t know us.
Those who appear as attractive characters have been discreetly told they inspired my stories. A few others who inspire some of the worst people in my stories are out of my life and, well, they don’t need to know and probably wouldn’t recognize themselves.
Then there are several real people who are identifiable because I use real names. Even within this list, several shouldn’t have much problem with what I wrote.
- I did use the name of the real sheriff of Elmore County in The Big Gumshoes but he is only referred to, never appears directly. I chose the Elmore County because I loved the name and the story of the town of Wetumpka which really is famous for having an impact crater. I’ve had the pleasure to visit Alabama but not Wetumpka.
- Angella Reid is the name of the long-serving Chief Usher in the White House at the time I first wrote Heart’s Desire in 2015. She was unsurprisingly let go (or left) during the Trump Administration—by all public accounts, she was very good at her job and I felt no qualms portraying her as such.
- A number of other celebrity names were also tossed out in Heart’s Desire as being out on the town with the First Gentleman and all have been linked by gossip rags as friends of Bill. I’m not worried much about insulting them because they are mostly only mentioned in passing.
But four stories, Heart’s Desire, The Offering, Times of Life and Death and The Severed World, contain real people depicted in ways that I had to think long and hard about. Maybe I let my ego get away from me, but these are some of my favorite stories from the collection and I couldn’t imagine leaving any of them out.
Times of Life and Death and The Severed World feature Lady Jane Grey and various members of her family and her husband’s family. With them being dead five-hundred years I’m not much worried about anyone being bothered by my depictions, except perhaps Tudor era scholars who love to argue about who really knows the truth about her life and death.
Perusing The Tudor Society website, I find there is disagreement among scholars of Tudor history (shocking, I know) about whether she was the ingenue caught up in events or someone who was actively involved in plotting the events that eventually led to her execution. She was, by many contemporary accounts, a bright, well-educated and animated girl. I chose that version because it fit into the story I wanted to tell about a time-traveling historian infatuated with one of his subjects.
When I put her in danger in The Severed World, I was faced with a conundrum, how could my historian save her so I can write more stories in this series, and, well, because that is what the narrative required. I enjoyed the time I spent on The Tudor Society website and it eventually came to me that my (completely invented) scholar-hero would have as his “super-power,” the ability to rally other historians and scholars to his aid so the the Tudor Society of our day has both continued on into Ian’s 2085 from our era but also exists in the the 2085 Ian and Jane returned to after changing history. It is fun to make scholars into heros.
So there are two uses of real people that did give me pause if I should publish my stories about them. Between Heart’s Desire which features President Hillary Clinton making a deal with the devil and The Offering about 19th Century artist Gustave Guillaumet, you might be surprised to know that the latter is the story I feel most ambivalent about fictionalizing the main characters—not because I am afraid of angering anyone, but because I don’t want to “Salieri” Guillaumet.
The Offering tells a story about two real 19th-century artists; Guillaumet, an orientalist painter enchanted with Algeria, and Louis-Ernest Barrias, his friend and mentor and the man who crafted Guillaumet’s tomb. It was Barrias’ graceful sculpture A Young Girl of Bou Saada that inspired this story. I did incorporate Guillaumet’s real and strange end into the story—he was indeed shot at the home of his mistress and taken back by his wife for his last months as he died from the gunshot. Pretty much all the other events in this story are complete creations of my imagination.
In the printed and Kindle versions of this story, I added an “author’s note” indicating that this is complete fiction. In the audiobook version, my narrator suggested, and I agreed, that the author’s note wasn’t needed and might distract from the story.
So I did, in fact, “Salieri” Guillaumet. I took a short passage from a contemporary NY Times article about his death and invented a wonderful narrative about his life and death that is almost certainly untrue and is completely made up out of whole cloth.
In the 1984, I was in my twenties and completely failed to impress a very attractive young lady by asking her to go with me to see “A-mod-e-us.” That said, I did eventually get to see “Amadeus” and did eventually learn how to properly pronounce its title. It is a good movie, if long, and the creepy scenes of the evil Antonio Salieri scaring Mozart to death were quite effective. I was pretty upset to find out that the basic storyline of a bitter rivalry between Salieri and Mozart is based completely on highly suspect rumors. Salieri is considered a fine composer in his own right and is not suspected by most historians of murder.
The ghost of Guillaumet can take cold comfort in the probability that The Offering will probably never be made into a multi-Oscar winning movie but I have to admit, I do feel a little guilty about not finding a good way to at least add a disclaimer to the audiobook.
Heart’s Desire is the other story in my book featuring real people as my fictional characters. This story was written before the 2016 election and features newly-elected President Hillary Clinton playing poker with the devil. After “winning” a hand, Clinton learns the devil’s gifts can hold more pain than his threats.
I don’t think anyone will take this story literally, except maybe some of the Q-Anon crowd who seem willing to believe just about anything. Nor is it truly meant as a knock on Secretary Clinton. It is political satire, I think it is funny, and I think the “Former Guy” comes off—in the background—much worse and more true to his real personality.
While I think I am safe from legal problems, I hope I am safe from being too offensive to anyone. I spent a decade as a reporter and got to learn that pretty much every politician has to make several proverbial deals with the devil just to do their jobs.
I would, however, be very interested in hearing how people react to my use of Clinton and Guillaumet in either or both Heart’s Desire and The Offering. Add a comment on this post or on my Instagram.
