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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48202
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48202
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

You don't. Turning a life into drama will almost certainly cause pain to those who remember that life. Life is more subtle than drama. Drama needs a definite shape that life lacks. That is why we value drama: it gives a shape to human experience that our pattern-seeking brain craves but cannot find in ordinary experience. But in doing so it simplifies, heightenes, rearranges, and makes its subjects either lighter or darker than they are in reality.

There is a reason that the news refers to its product as "stories". It twists the complex and inconclusive reality into a simple and conclusive drama that is easy to digest and takes sides on. Drama is how we want the world to be, not how it is. Drama is the world we can get our simple inadequate brains around, not the incomprehensive reality we actually live in.

Make a real life into a drama and it will either work as a drama and offend those who knew the real life, or it will suck as a drama and bore everyone else.

There is a very good reason that books routinely deny any depiction of any person living or dead, even the ones that most they most obviously portray. It is not just to avoid liability, though that is the heart of it, it is to distance them from the reality on which they comment, but which they cannot pretend to fully portray.

Original score: 14