In a post on his Substack blog, George Saunders writes about the ethical considerations you should make when using the experiences of a family member or friend in your writing.
Saunders has written from life, including some non-fiction articles, and was uncomfortable with the results. Instead, he prefers pure imagination, flavored with life experience.
“I might use part of a person – a trait or a gesture or a certain way of speaking or what they have come to represent to me – but that thing is usually pulled out of the real-life context and used…for something else,” he says. “I might notice a certain behavioral tendency – someone is always completing someone else’s sentences, for example. I pull that tendency out and assign it to a character, to whom I also ascribe other traits, some invented or lifted from a second person.” As a result, the real-life person from whom the trait was lifted should be entirely unrecognizable in his fiction.
However, many other writers don’t take this approach and many lift directly from life, with clearly recognizable friends and family members in their writing. “But it’s a fraught choice, to use one’s real life in a book,” Saunders says. “But it might be necessary, especially if the writer has determined, through trial-and-error, that her best writing will come from this approach.”
Saunders says the right approach for you might depend on your views on literature. Is some discomfort worth the healing and revelation of great writing? What do you think?
