There is a question every novelist fields sooner or later, usually from someone leaning in slightly too close over a cup of tea. “Am I in one of your books?” They ask it hoping the answer is yes. They want to hear that the charismatic hero is a lightly fictionalised tribute to them, and not, say, the convicted paedophile referenced in chapter fourteen.
The honest answer is more slippery than either of us would like. Yes, authors borrow from real people constantly. No, it almost never works the way readers imagine. No author, to the best of my knowledge, walks a person straight from their life directly onto a page. What actually happens is closer to a magpie problem: I steal a laugh from one person, a way of holding a mug from another, a phrase my brother uses, and the peculiar facial features of a former teacher. Stitch a dozen characteristics together, and you have a character. Show that character to any of the donors, and they won’t spot a single stolen part, because none of them ever owned the whole car.
That is the reassuring version. History, unfortunately, is stuffed with the other kind.
The flattering way to end up in a book
Sometimes a real person becomes a character as an act of genuine admiration. The tidiest example is the most famous detective in the world. Arthur Conan Doyle built Sherlock Holmes largely on Dr Joseph Bell, a surgeon he studied under at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, where he also worked for a time as Bell’s clerk. Bell could look at a stranger and deduce their trade, their recent travels, and their ailments before they had finished sitting down, which is a marvellous gift in a diagnostician and an even better one in a fictional sleuth.
Doyle never hid the debt. He wrote to Bell directly: “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes.” As tributes go, that beats a card. Being told you inspired the greatest detective in literature is the sort of compliment most of us would happily die having received, ideally with the deduction of the cause left to a professional.
The unflattering way to end up in a book
Then there is the other tradition, in which an author reaches for a real person not out of love but out of a lingering grudge, and files the serial numbers off just badly enough for everyone to know exactly who it is.
Ernest Hemingway turned this into something close to a hobby. His 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises drew heavily on a real trip to Pamplona the year before, and several of his travelling companions found themselves pinned to the page like butterflies. Lady Duff Twysden, a socialite he fancied, surfaced as Lady Brett Ashley. Harold Loeb fared worse. A fellow writer cursed with the twin misfortunes of being romantically successful and of irritating Hemingway, he came back as Robert Cohn, the novel’s punchbag, and the portrayal reportedly wounded him for years afterwards. Hemingway, by all accounts, considered this a job well done.
The lesson repeats down the decades. Fall out with a novelist, and there is a non-trivial chance you will spend eternity as a minor character who marries a goat. No details about the honeymoon required.
When the character eats the person
The strangest fate of all belongs to the people who become beloved. Consider Christopher Robin Milne, whose father, A. A. Milne, borrowed his young son’s name, his toys, and his nursery for a set of stories about a bear of very little brain. The boy adored it at first. Then the books conquered the planet, and he became the reluctant human face of a global brand while still in short trousers.
School turned savage. The bullying reportedly grew bad enough that he took up boxing at thirteen to defend himself against classmates who found the storybook connection hilarious. He spent much of his life wrestling with the whole business, though he did make a quiet peace with it near the end, saying he could finally look at those four books without flinching. His father immortalised him and inconvenienced him in the same stroke of the pen. Both things stayed true for decades.
The bit where the lawyers arrive
If admiration and revenge sit at the two ends of the spectrum, the middle is where the legal letters live. Basing a character on a real person is not, in itself, against the law. Basing a recognisable character on a real person and then having them do something defamatory is a different matter entirely, and the courts have views.
The case authors mutter about is The Red Hat Club, a 2003 bestseller by Haywood Smith. A Georgia woman named Vickie Stewart recognised herself in a character called SuSu, and she had grounds: the two shared where they grew up, their jobs, the shape of their marriages, and the manner of a first husband’s death, reportedly more than thirty overlapping details. The trouble: the fictional SuSu also happened to be a promiscuous alcoholic who misbehaved at work as a flight attendant. In November 2009, a jury sided with Stewart and awarded her a hundred thousand dollars. Thirty accurate details plus one invented vice adds up, it turns out, to a rather significant bill.
Novelists being novelists, some responded not with caution but with mischief. There is a grim little trick known in the trade as the “small penis rule,” the theory being that if you want to skewer a real enemy in fiction, you should also give the character an unusually small penis, on the grounds that no man on earth will stand up in open court and announce, “Yes, that inadequately endowed villain is unmistakably me.” Michael Crichton is the famous practitioner. After the journalist Michael Crowley wrote a review Crichton disliked, a character named “Mick Crowley” popped up in his 2006 novel Next: a Yale-educated journalist, a child rapist, and, yes, a man of notably modest dimensions. Subtle it is not. Yet it apparently never landed him in court. I can’t imagine why.
So how do I actually do it?
Carefully, and with the magpie method above. My novels tend to be full of ordinary people in extraordinary trouble, and the surest way to make an ordinary person feel real on the page is to build them from a hundred tiny observed truths rather than one whole living human. I will happily lift the way a stranger in the queue ahead of me sighs at a card machine, or the specific optimism of a bloke buying a lottery ticket he cannot afford. I will not lift my neighbour and hand him a secret drink problem and a court date.
The people who fear they are in my books almost never are. The bits of them that I have magpied away are far too small to notice, and far too well hidden. That, I think, is the deal you make. You take the texture of real life, you scatter it across a dozen invented souls, and if you have done the job properly, everyone recognises the feeling, and nobody recognises themselves.
I do have one confession to make, though. I often ‘borrow’ names of people who follow me on social media and use that name for a minor character. Thankfully, this is considered a treat by those whose names have graced my pages, even when a character isn’t entirely wholesome.
If you fancy meeting a few of those stitched-together souls, three of mine are worth a look. Kenneth is told entirely in the voice of Kelly Coburn, a newly divorced woman with a ginger tomcat and a fondness for Pinot, and writing a whole novel in her head taught me more about building a believable person than anything else I have done. Waiting in The Sky follows Simon, a man who has spent almost thirty years convinced he is an alien waiting to be collected, and it remains the most personal, most human thing I have written. And The ’86 Fix hands an utterly ordinary bloke a weekend back in 1986, which is the whole game: take a person you would pass without a glance, then give their small life something enormous to carry.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do authors base their characters on real people?
Often, but rarely in a whole or obvious way. Most characters are composites, assembled from small observed details borrowed from many different people and blended with pure invention. A character occasionally maps closely onto one real individual, but that is the exception rather than the rule, and usually the borrowed traits are too scattered to be recognisable.
Is it legal to base a fictional character on a real person?
Basing a character on a real person is not illegal in itself. The risk arises when a real person is clearly identifiable in the character and the story then attributes false and damaging behaviour to them. That can amount to defamation, as the author Haywood Smith discovered when a jury awarded a plaintiff a hundred thousand dollars over a recognisable character in The Red Hat Club in 2009.
Which famous characters were based on real people?
Sherlock Holmes was largely modelled on Dr Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle’s teacher in Edinburgh. Robert Cohn in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises drew on the writer Harold Loeb, and the boy in Winnie-the-Pooh took his name and toys from A. A. Milne’s son, Christopher Robin Milne. The results ranged from a proud tribute to a lifelong source of resentment.
What is the “small penis rule”?
It is an informal and rather cynical trick some authors use to avoid libel claims. The idea is that if you base an unflattering character on a real enemy, you also give the character an embarrassing physical trait such as a very small penis, because no man is likely to sue and publicly identify himself as that character. Michael Crichton is the best-known example, in his 2006 novel Next.
Does Keith A Pearson put real people in his novels?
Not as whole, recognisable individuals. Like most novelists, Keith borrows tiny fragments of observed behaviour and scatters them across invented characters, so the finished person feels real without belonging to anyone in particular. The people who suspect they have been written into one of his books almost always have not.