In an article for Writer’s Digest, journalist Carolyn Jack offers advice on writing about family without getting uninvited from Thanksgiving dinner. “The problem in fiction is that we writers naturally draw on both our own experiences and those of other people we know for inspiration and the kinds of details that help create verisimilitude,” Jack writes. “So how do we reconcile the need to protect our sources with the need to write about them?”
The noble way is to not do it at all, which is both boring and difficult. The fraught way is to write mostly about relatives you don’t like, so a bit of ostracism may not be too hard to swallow. One middle path between these extremes is to ask a subject’s permission before writing smack about them. Not for the weak.
Jack also suggests a practical path: writing about your relationships with people who are dead. “Basing our characters on family who have passed automatically makes authors’ work easier in terms of avoiding hurt feelings and/or libel suits,” she says. “But as many of us can’t do this, a parallel road is available: Use that living family member as a model of whatever characteristic or situation drives the story, but camouflage it with details quite unlike the person’s real life.”
For example, you may create a character similar in temperament to the real-life person you wish to examine, but alter all of the surrounding details to make them significantly less recognizable on the page. “What works even better than exact copying is taking the essence of that family or individual relative and adding outside, but equally believable, characteristics to it,” Jack says. “Blending in other qualities and episodes from other sources helps us make our fictional person an enhanced, richer version of the model we have in mind, one who will intensify the message and the impact we want to deliver.”
Change your character’s age, appearance, and occupation. You may consider swapping sexes or changing the setting or timeline to mask their identity even further. “Altering a reality-based character’s situation and traits can do that inverse work of both disguising and revealing character,” Jack writes, adding that context and relationships are more important than individual details.
“We need to create for readers a sense of how our characters are with each other, because humans act differently with their families than with other people,” she says. “We have to recognize the special ways family members speak to each other, how they touch each other, what jokes they share, what expressions they use over and over, what buttons they know to push.” If you can master these elements, you can write about anyone without worrying about the holidays.
