But if your real sister once secretly sabotaged a romantic rival’s “Story of the Amazing Human Brain” middle school science fair project, you have no right to use that. Of course you can write about sisters, imagined sisters. If you use people in your circle-family members, friends, friends of friends, whoever has let you into their lives and been let into yours-in such a way that they are easily recognizable to themselves, to others, then you’ve invaded their privacy. If you Google “basing fictional characters on real people,” you’ll get a lot of advice about avoiding lawsuits, but legal issues are not the point. Scott Fitzgerald famously bragged that no matter their sex, age, social standing, “All my characters are Scott Fitzgeralds.” I’ve always admired that claim and hoped it was true of my own fictional characters. A much better question: “Where do you get your characters?”į. Chasing down and making use of ideas is a messy process. Plots, themes, settings for stories and novels can arrive all at once (so I’ve heard), but mostly they’re lobbed over the transom at any time of day or night in discrete packets of varying size and worth, and we piece them together as we stare for hours at blank pages or screens. The subconscious is in charge of all that, and the subconscious, for all its wonders, is hardly an organizing genius. “Where do you get your ideas?” Writers sigh when asked this because we are clueless.
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