Is it ok to reference names of real world people?
The protagonist in my autobiographical novel is a girl on spiritual adventures. I have the idea of her looks in my mind, but I don't want to dedicate words to explicitly express her looks, so is it OK if I just mention in one line that she looks like some real world actress? Also, can I mention names of some real-world spiritual teachers as she meets them on her journey?
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People Change
One thing to remember is that celebrities (and all of us for that matter) change and age with time. So what a celebrity looks like "today" may not be what she looks "now".
She was cute as a button, like one of the Olsen twins, but when she grew up, she grew up to look like China Phillips.
Now is I wrote that back in the 90s, you would have the idea of a cute little girl, blonde-haired girl who became rather large. Reading this today (2018) brings images of thing party girls and a mature woman.
And the following sounds even worse:
She was cute as a button, like one of the Olsen twins (from the third season of Full House), but when she grew up, she grew up to look like China Phillips (during her time with Wilson-Phillips).
Picture the character in your mind and your notes but avoid giving specific people description, whenever possible.
She was cute as a button: pig tails, blue eyes, and a contagious smile. Adolescence left her rotund, but with the same smile.
Again, that might be what you want to go for.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35136. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Well, first off, like ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere mentioned, make sure to be careful with how you portray a real person. There are many possible ways to mess up, not least of which is libel which was mentioned in the previous answer.
However, and I have said this before: don't make the reader look things up in order to understand the story! It completely breaks immersion if I have to go look up what a particular person looks like, even if that is just a short Internet search away. Just don't. It's okay if the reader has the option to do that (one of my favorite authors regularly slips little real-life tidbits into her writing), but don't make them do it.
Instead, describe the individual as they appear within the story. This doesn't need to be excessive (you might want to check out my question At what point does a POV character noting their surroundings go from showing/telling to an infodump? for some discussion on a closely related issue), but it should be enough to get some idea of what the person they're describing looks like. You can then, depending on your point of view character and how they relate to this individual, write something appropriately-voiced along the lines of "the way s/he looked made me think of the name of some movie star goes here".
This also has the advantage that you're showing an association made by the POV, narrating, or talking character within the story; not making something that can reasonably be construed as a statement of fact about someone in the real world. That alone should go a long way, though not necessarily all the way, toward alleviating e.g. libel concerns.
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