"Real people don't make good fictional characters". Really true?

Characters can be based on real people. John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Hitler: real life leaders, gangsters, royalty, heroes and villains.

There are several problems with putting them in stories or novels.

For one, you cannot possibly know what they really think and feel or why they really did X instead of Y, if they even thought of Y, what they were feeling at the moment of the decision.

When we try to transcribe unplanned real-world speech from a recording, it is filled with pauses, um, uh, ah. Broken sentences, self-interruption, etc. It is boring to read.

Real life is the same way. Anything you portray is a sketch or caricature. for instance, you don't know what Thomas Jefferson's love life was like with Sally Hemings, the slave girl he (by computation) first impregnated when she was 14. She bore seven children by him (the first died as an infant). You can't even know anything about how she felt about him, her life, or anything else. She left no writing of any kind. You can know other people said she was quite beautiful, but that's about it.

The rest of Jefferson's life is similar. What did he do and think, day to day? You don't know. All we know about Jefferson is very distilled through his letters and the writings of others, and actual facts recorded, like land sales or contracts or business dealings he had. Which is not the real Jefferson. For later technological persons, photos, voice recordings and videos. Even a non-fiction biography is limited to such things. We know Jefferson recorded the name of the father for every child born to one of his slaves except for the children born to Sally Hemings. What was in his mind and what was he feeling when he made that choice? We might guess but will never know.

Characters in a fiction that limit themselves to actual known facts of acts and statements are boring. Mitch McConnell is alive, but I don't know him, and even if I did I can't say with certainty what his motivations are, how corrupt he is, why he does what he does, whether he thinks of anyone but himself at any given time.

To me, that's a boring character in a book; pretty much completely opaque.

Now you can base a fictional character on the acts, achievements and failures of a real person. The miniseries John Adams did a good job of that, but it is highly fictionalized. John Adams is far more than a few hundred lines of dialogue. So is Steve Jobs. But Luke Skywalker is not, Captain Kirk is not, Frodo is not, they are contained in their entirety in the pages.

Even if you write about yourself, authors cannot represent anything but a sketch, and likely filter out the most embarrassing or troubling parts of their past, rejections and stupid failures and stupid acts they regret, they forget what their motivations were and cannot remember what they were thinking. Real life is fatal to story telling. Characters are streamlined to create the illusion of real life, but real life is not streamlined, and trying to portray a real person in fiction is necessarily very selective and thus not representative of the real thing.

That's my opinion. I think authors are far better off inventing characters readers can actually understand and know for certain (by the end of the book or series at least) the truth of the character.

posted over 6 years ago

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Amadeus‭

3156 reputation 2 1399 613 37

Characters based on real people are the only ones worth spending any time on.

You will never achieve any real depth with an archetype, or with a walking plot device. To fool the reader into spending real emotion on a fake person, you have to make them seem real, and there is absolutely no better way to do that than to closely watch and observe real people. The very best writers were all observers of people, and the people they observed came out in their writing.

The plot is an abstraction just like the setting. It doesn't matter whether the character is sitting on a steam train heading into the old west or about to be launched into space to board a starship or sitting in an office cubicle. What a reader cares about is that he is worried about his son's developmental problems, is mad at his wife, and secretly ashamed of the business his family is in. The universality of the human experience is what good writing is about, and the very best way to get at that is to watch real people and yes, sometimes use real people in stories.

If you think that you are so incredibly brilliant that you can literally simulate five or ten people as complex, as deep, as conflicted and fucked up and beautiful as five random people you meet on a bus all in your own head and print out their behaviors like the output of a computer program, you are both deluded and in the wrong line of business.

Really great characters grow out of parts of us, but they need the complexity than can only be achieved by observing real people in the real world. The closer to a real person, the better the character.

Don't listen to people with their theories about how "real people wouldn't fight a threat or do really interesting things" because A: they absolutely do in real life, and B: the EVENT or THING is not the interesting part about a good story, it is how the PERSON we are following reacts to it. What kinds of stories really grab us and pull us in? Would you say Transformers is better than Breaking Bad because the characters are more obviously clear cut and don't get distracted by too much "real world style" complexity? If so, I really pity you. No matter what the characters are doing or where they are, that grounding in what real people really would do is what gives them the realism to allow a reader to suspend their disbelief, forget about whether a fire breathing dragon could ever really exist, and just get lost in the psychic pain of the knight watching him make for the town his family lives in, knowing he has no way to stop him in time.

EDIT: Mark Twain based Huckleberry Finn on Tom Blankenship. "In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was." Virtually EVERY character in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" is based directly on a real person. Severus Snape was based on a real teacher Rowling had. William Faulkner based many, many characters on real people. So did Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises is 100% based on real people). Steinbeck based Adam Trask on a neighbor, John Green based The Fault In Our Stars on a real person he met at a Harry Potter convention, Everything Pat Conroy ever wrote was based on real people.

I'll go into a little detail just on Hemingway; After The Sun Also Rises, he was criticized by John Don Passos for basing characters too much on real people. He reacted by satirizing this style of writing in Torrents Of Spring (which was much less successful). His friend F Scott Fitzgerald maintained that basing characters on real people was the right way to go and he did this extensively in his own novels. Hemingway continued to do so, though not as transparently as in Sun Also Rises "the way a painter will use a model" according to most people who studied his work.

Allow me to quote from a textbook here (Fiction Writing Master Class: Emulating the Work of Great Novelists to Master the Fundamentals of Craft by William Cane.) "Was Hemingway cheating by using real people as the basis of characters for his fiction? Or was he doing what all great artists do, including portrait painters like John Singer Sargent, N.C. Wyeth, and Norman Rockwell? How you answer this question reveals a lot about your maturity as a writer. ...Every great writer from Tolstoy to Flaubert to Hemingway to today's heavyweights uses real people as the model for fictional characters. Some beginning writers fear basing fictional characters on real people... ...some writers don't know how to base characters on real people. ...Don't write stories about totally made-up people. Base characters on people you know and your stories will spring from an undercurrent of reality that can't fail to move readers."

If you REALLY think that a totally made up character based on an archetype is going to be more universally appealing than the Great Gatsby, Severus Snape, or Huckleberry Finn, you go right ahead, but you are literally flying in the face of the methods of all of the most revered novelists of the last two centuries. Just sayin...

posted over 6 years ago

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JBiggs‭

25 reputation 0 5 5 0

Sure! You'd be surprised how many great fictional characters were based on people the author met, people interesting enough we idiomatically call them "characters".(Well, maybe you wouldn't be surprised if you appreciate how writing benefits from reflecting human nature.) For example, Basil Fawlty was inspired by a real hotel manager encountered in holiday. The key is using the traits that make someone interesting in real life as a starting point for character design. You have to change or invent some details: not to make them even more interesting, but to plant them into your world, alongside your other characters. (For example, how much do you think John Cleese knew about that real person?)

posted over 6 years ago

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J.G.‭

320 reputation 5 39 58 0

Personally I believe the reason not to use real people in fiction is very simple: the writer already knows them too well.

When you write about a person that you know first-hand, it is very difficult to know what to tell the reader in order for them to understand the character. Anyone that you've known for years would be very difficult to summarize in a few sentences, but that is the job of a writer. Unless you're writing a biography, you can't just transcribe someone's entire life story to make the reader understand the nuances of their personality.

So even if you manage to break down this person's character into a digestible description, trying to separate what you know about the person from what the reader knows about the character becomes very difficult. You may know what the real life person would do in a given situation, but if you put that into writing, it may seem entirely out of character to the reader, as they only have a limited knowledge of who they are.

However, when inventing a character, the writer is forced to go through the same journey as the reader. They also need to understand what makes this fictional character the way they are, and it is much easier to have the same expectations and understanding of the character as the reader will have, which ironically makes them a much more realistic portrayal of an actual person.

Doing this for a real famous person is a middle ground between a fictional and real life person. The writer can always make an assumption that the reader will have a certain level of knowledge of the character already, so they won't have to go into excruciating detail when describing the character.

On the other hand, it is difficult to know exactly what any specific reader will feel about a character based on a famous person, so it is much harder to control the narrative. Particularly with interesting people who are worthy of having stories about them, different readers might have completely opposing opinions of them already established.

Overall I wouldn't say it's impossible to write a story containing a real-life person, but I wouldn't advise it. Real historical figures would probably be the best to make stories of, but usually the only reason we know anything about them at all is because their life has already been documented in stories.

posted over 6 years ago

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Mike.C.Ford‭

165 reputation 8 17 30 0

I will suggest a slightly different reason than others. Specifically, one of the problems we have with reality is that it is sometimes unbelievable or formulaic. Modern politics in many Western countries, for instance, might seem cartoonish and overly dramatic to someone who wasn't familiar with it.

"Reality is stranger than fiction" isn't just a saying, or just a comment on reality. It's also a comment on fiction. Making fiction believable sometimes means that you can't base your characters on actual people, because some actual people behave in ways that are unbelievable.

posted over 6 years ago

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Dave L‭

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There are two things that every fictional character needs to be likable: a clear motivation or goal and a distinct voice or personality that comes through their actions and dialogue.

Real people are vastly more complicated than this, of course. As a result, the difficulty with writing a story with a character based on a real person is that, in addition to (or sometimes instead of) focusing on giving the character a motivation and a voice, writers are tempted to add a third metric - how closely the character reflects their real-life inspiration. Unfortunately, in most cases, readers don't care about that aspect, and if a writer lets it take away from a character's motivation and voice, readers will be left with a less compelling character to read about.

If you can distill the inspiration you take from a real person into a clear motivation and clear voice for the character you write, you can make it work. An excellent example of this is the movie The Disaster Artist, which is about the creation of the cult classic and absolute bomb of a movie The Room. The main characters, Greg Sestero and Tommy Wiseau, are the two men who drove the production of The Room, so viewers of The Disaster Artist went into the film with expectations of how Greg and Tommy were going to be portrayed. The Disaster Artist does achieve fidelity to who Tommy and Greg actually are (or at least how their fans imagine them). For example, Tommy has, in real life, an impossible-to-place accent, leading to wild speculation about whether he is an immigrant and if so, where he is from. The Disaster Artist makes this aspect of him a running gag and important plot point. But the movie also captures a clear motivation for Greg and Tommy: to achieve their dreams of becoming actors and breaking into Hollywood. And it also captures clear voices for them: Greg is a naive kid in his twenties who gradually realizes how deep in over his head he is, and Tommy is wildly eccentric and wears his emotions on his sleeves. By creating clear motivations and voices for its main characters, The Disaster Artist successfully translated two very real people into fictional characters while still being largely accurate to who they really are.

posted over 6 years ago

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Kevin‭

175 reputation 0 32 35 8

First, as others have noted, real people's lives are rarely as event-filled as the lives of fictional characters. For example, Howard Carter became a world-renowned archaeologist when he discovered the tomb of King Tut. John Champollion became famous for deciphering the Rosetta Stone. I could give other examples, of course. For each of these men, this was the achievement of a lifetime. They then spent the rest of their lives examining their great find and refining their conclusions. But for a fictional character like Indiana Jones, we expect him to make AT LEAST one discovery like this in each movie or book. A fictional archaeologist will likely make dozens of amazing discoveries in his career. Because, "and then he went back and studied the same thing further and added several footnotes to his book" would not make a very exciting story.

Second, any story that uses a real person as a character is almost inevitably a lie. First of all, the person's life has to be simplified. "Docudramas" often create "composite characters". That is, the real person may have had ten good friends who all encouraged him to do whatever over the course of years. But in a story, we don't want ten characters each of whom has some small role. The writer often combines these into one character with a big role. Something that a real person figured out bit by bit over the course of many years gets simplified down to one "eureka" moment. Etc.

Furthermore, many important real-life events happened when no one was watching. At least, no one who wrote it down. The writer has to invent how these things might have happened. He has to invent what was said in private conversations. Etc.

We tend to expect fiction to be definitive. I mean, for everything to be wrapped up neat and tidy. Characters may be complex, but in the end we expect the hero's motives to be basically good and the villain's motives to be basically evil. I've seen many docudramas where the writers apparently found it necessary to make excuses for bad things that the hero did. The hero can have character flaws, but he must redeem himself by the end. He can run from danger and abandon his friends in scene 1, but if he does, he must be incredibly courageous by the end. He can be inconsiderate of his wife at the beginning, but by the end he must demonstrate his great love for her. Etc. It is surely POSSIBLE to write a story with a truly flawed hero. But apparently writers find this very difficult to actually do most of the time.

And finally, if you use a real person, you then have to battle between your opinions about this person and the readers' opinions. If you present him as a great hero, there will be readers who think he was not such a good guy at all, maybe even that he was a horribly evil person. And vice versa.

posted over 6 years ago

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Jay‭

1055 reputation 1 97 207 0

My experience is that "real people" don't make good characters in their original form. Many of my fictitious characters are idealized versions of real ones. They are decidedly better than their originals, and that's what makes them "relatable."

In one of my fictitious works, the heroine insults a teenaged boy that the hero has befriended. Then she realizes her mistake, turns around and apologizes, wins back the hero, and gets the story back on track. This scene was suggested by a true story in which the real-life protagonist "doubled down" on her insults, and the real life version came to a grinding halt.

And while even the fictitious character's behavior may leave something to be desired, the story gave her an "excuse" (a medical reason) for it. The whole point of the medical reason was to create sympathy for the character; that is, if she's just out of a hospital, maybe she should be cut some slack for her words and actions.

You can even make fictitious characters worse than their originals, if that makes them "outstanding." What you don't want in a story is mediocre characters that don't rise to the occasion, which is what (original) real life characters too often are.

posted over 6 years ago

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Tom Au‭

335 reputation 24 26 53 0

It very much depends on what you mean by "real people". You can, of course, make people from history into characters in fiction, as writers of historical novels do, and you can base characters on people you know, as Kerouac based Dean Moriarty on Neal Cassidy . In that sense you clearly can base characters on real people.

But on another level the question might be rephrased as, can you make stories out of real lives? Here the waters get much more muddy. Almost always when a novel is based on a real incident or a character on a real person, the author cleans up and simplifies the story, sometimes moving incidents around, merging or eliminating characters, or adding outright inventions.

One of the great questions of existence, perhaps the greatest question, is does life have meaning? Our brains are pattern-making engines, and often they find pattern and order in things were objectively it does not exist. If the materialists are to be believed, the universe is random and disinterested. Our lives mean nothing and our deaths mean nothing and nothing that happens in between has any larger shape or meaning. The great religions of the world all consist of denials of this, of assertions, in the face of the chaos of everyday life, that this is indeed a meaning to life and a shape to human affairs.

Stories do the same thing. They assert an order and meaning to life. They are an artifact of the pattern finding brain finding a pattern in the lives and actions and destinies of people. Go far enough back and the stories are all religious in nature and origin.

The postmodernists tried to assert the meaningless of life against the religious story arc of the classical west and the progress-based story arc of the moderns. But it did not make for much of a literature. Who reads Camus anymore?

But whether you accept that human life has shape, meaning, and destiny or not, the everyday life of most people is characterized more by stasis and chaos than it is by a well defined story arc. Story lives are a cleaned up, focussed, version of life with all of the dross and the distractions stripped away. Every motion and decision is purified, enhanced, concentrated, and focussed. The path of the story arc is straightened and made smooth.

Whether life is ultimately meaningless or meaningful, ordinary lives are too mired in chaos and inertia to make good stories. If you believe life does have meaning, then you need to clean up the messiness and banality of everyday living so that the real shape of life can become apparent. And if you believe that life does not have meaning, then your story is essentially a fantasy designed to comfort the pattern seeking brain, to quiet the rising howl of despair as it looks into the abyss and sees only chaos.

Either way, ordinary lives are not the stuff of stories.

posted over 6 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

4371 reputation 12 1104 744 58

Here's a way to look at it: suppose a Cerberus the size of a horse shows up in the middle of a crowded shopping centre and starts grabbing people. Most "real" people would either run away screaming, or freeze in horrified shock. These people don't make a good story - they are boring. They are reactive, not proactive. The interesting character is the person who would attempt to face the monster, or help people away from it, etc. Now, this character is not "unreal" - it's not impossible that one such person would be found. Maybe even more than one. But they'd still be the one standing out, right?

When a real person is told "don't go to place X, it's dangerous, it could kill you", most "real" people would avoid place X. And then you have no story. Most real people miss clues because they were distracted, make excuses for why they failed at something, lack the determination to relentlessly pursue their goals, are sometimes too tired to do what they know they should - they are blander than they would like to be, blander than you'd want your character to be.

That is not to say that there are no people who would be like the characters you would want to portray, but such people are rare. There's a reason not every soldier becomes Napoleon.

That is not to say that real people, boring everyday people, shouldn't be an inspiration for you. The kind of character quirks the people you know might have - it's hard to come up with these if you have to invent everything from scratch. Observe people. The stuff that makes a person, any person, interesting, for good or ill - that's great story material.

posted over 6 years ago

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Galastel‭

1885 reputation 81 551 319 3