Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34385
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34385
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 3