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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34406
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 5