Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34386
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34386
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 19