How to use real life in your fiction

How to write about real life people, places and events in your fiction (without offending your loved ones)

The real world is a mine of inspiration for writers, but is it possible – or adviseable – to use your real life in your fiction? 

Is it ever okay to put your friends and family into your novel? Can you turn people you know into characters in your book without starting an endless family feud? Will people be offended if you write about them, or add them to your story without telling them? Or is there a way that you can write about real world people, events and places, without causing offence? These are the questions I hope to answer for you in this blog post. 

First: Two Disclaimers

1) As a general rule, writing about people you know – without their express permission – is a Very Bad Idea. Other people don’t see themselves the way you see them, and they don’t remember events the way you do. Even if they say they’re okay with you writing about them, they might change their mind when they read what you’ve written. (If you’re writing a straight memoir, this may be unavoidable, but be prepared for the fallout.)

2) I put my family, my friends, and events from my life in my novels all the time. Everyone is still speaking to me (as far as I know).

How can both these things be true? Simple. 

I never, ever lift one person, one event, one experience directly from my real life and fictionalise them in my story. Never.  

Here’s what I do instead.

How to turn real people into fictional characters

This is the trickiest one, I find. The people we know and love – or even just people we meet on the street, or see on a screen – are the greatest inspiration we have for characters. But if we just copy and paste them from real life into our novels, either those real people will be upset, or readers will identify our characters from the film they watched last Saturday night and accuse you of copying. 

Neither of these outcomes are good. 

Besides, you don’t want to copy a person wholesale – because that character will hardly ever be an exact right fit for your book. 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t take real people or existing characters as your starting point. 

Writing Exercise

Pick a person you know, a celebrity or a fictional character, that you’d like to include in a story. 

Analyse what it is about their character that fascinates you. Is it their mannerisms? Their appearance? Their attitude to life? The conflicts they face? What draws you to them? 

Do the same for two or three other people. 

Look over the details and find any common ground, as well as any traits that just don’t work together. 

Any details that are just too identifiable (say, a friend’s catchphrase, or your dad’s birthmark) twist and change to something new (a different phrase, or action, or an alternative physical trait)

Take your lists and build a brand new character from the different traits you’ve identified!

Friends and family who read your books may well think they can identify with your characters, but if you do this right there’ll always be enough fiction mixed in with your fact for you to show them otherwise. 

How to turn real places into fictional settings

I love taking different places I’ve visited and combining them to create a whole new world. The advantage here is that buildings and mountains don’t get upset when you recreate them wholesale in your novel. 

(Obviously, you might be writing about a real location within your story – in which case, just do your research and check the map, or a local reader will almost certainly pull you up on it.) 

As with characters, you can pick and choose details from different, real locations and put them together to create a brand new one. Just make sure that the different parts work together to make a realistic whole. 

Writing Exercise

Head over to Pinterest and set up a Locations board. Search for and pin photos of different sorts of locations that appeal to you – country houses, coastlines, exotic locales – anything that takes your fancy. Or, add in photos of your own favourite spots around the world – vacation snaps are perfect for this.

Organise them into types of settings, ones that could reasonably coexist together in one location. Say, tropical settings, small town settings, seaside settings – that sort of thing.

Then, take one group and create your new setting! Draw out a map, or write a description of the place you’ve created. Come up with a story for how every building came to be there, or what the locals think about that new monument. Make it come to life for you, and it’ll come to life for your readers, too. 

Examples

In the Love Trilogy, I set three stories around the fictional Welsh seaside town of Aberarian. But in truth, the town – and the surrounding locations – were all amalgams of places I know and love in Wales. Porthmadog town made up a lot of the centre (including the crumbling cinema that features in An A to Z of Love) combined with the esplanade and seafront from Tenby in Pembrokeshire.

The Avalon Inn, setting for Room for Love, was based on a number of small hotels I’ve stayed in over the years – especially the vile, psychedelic carpet – and the Welsh dresser that appears is my great-grandma’s dresser, which now lives in my home. Summer of Love, too, features places from my memory. The craft centre at the old water mill is a mix of one I visited in Derbyshire and another in North Wales. And the Starfish Restaurant in An A to Z of Love is hugely based on a restaurant I love in Tenby! 

How to turn real life events and experiences into fiction

As I mentioned at the start, no two people remember an event exactly the same way, which is just one reason to be very careful about putting real events in your fiction, especially if they’re events involving your loved ones. 

Personally, I like to take small moments and include them, rather than big events – and even then, I often change them up to fit my story. Or, as I describe in my How To Discover Your Next Big Idea blog post, I often use something I call the ‘What If’ technique to use real events to spark new, fictional ones. 

Writing Exercise

Pick an event – from your life, from the news, from fiction, anywhere. 

Plot out all the essential steps required to make that event happen, from start to finish. Who needed to meet, who needed to be in a certain place at a certain time, what coincidences played into events, that sort of thing. 

Now, start coming up with alternative realities for the event. What would have happened if Marcy hadn’t been there to stop David from going after Heather? What if the policeman had shown up ten minutes earlier? What if you’d stopped home that night instead of going out? What if Lillian had an older sister instead of a younger brother? 

What if yourself into a brand new story – then tell it. 

Examples

Summer on Seashell Island is obviously a big What If story (what if Mum and Dad had decided to stay on holiday instead of coming home as planned), even though nothing else in the book reflects my family or real life. 

The Last Days of Summer also took real life events and made them new – and fictional. The story starts with the heroine, Kia, returning to the family home for her grandparent’s golden wedding anniversary party. This was definitely influenced by my own grandparent’s 50^th anniversary party, which remains possibly the biggest party of my life so far! 

There’s another, smaller moment  in that book that stems from real life, though. Just before the party, Kia is looking for her grandfather, Nathanial, and can’t find him anywhere. Until she sees a column of smoke rising from her childhood tree house – and finds him inside, smoking his pipe!

In real life, that was my dad, hiding from us kids one day – a memory that stayed with me through the years, just waiting for the right moment to appear, immortalised in fiction.