Writing about real people
And why it's important to leave out more than you put in
At the front of most novels there is a disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.”
This disclaimer is at the front of every one of my novels, and it’s…not true. I should really raise this with my publisher, because all four of my books have been based to some extent on real events, places or people.
I’m often asked if I’m allowed to write about people who really existed. Of course the answer is yes. Who is going to stop me? Who would I ask for permission? I’m hardly writing The Crown, and even that doesn’t need sign-off. All my characters/people are long dead and somewhat little-known. From women accused of witchcraft to the richest heiress in England, their lives might be full and fascinating, but they’re hardly household names.
One of the first things you learn in journalism law is that you can’t libel the dead. It is impossible to damage someone’s reputation who will no longer be damaged by it. But there is an inference to the question: that my stories will amount to libel, that the people I write about will be cast in a negative light. While I aim to write fully rounded characters with shades of light and dark, I don’t set out to make them look bad or good. I want only to make them feel real on the page, interesting and sympathetic. I don’t mean for them to be likeable or dislikable, only believable.
Angela Burdett-Coutts is the most “famous” of my characters in that much is known and has been written about her. It was nice, actually, to be able to turn to biographies for the first time. But I do think you can know too much about a person. It provokes a sense of anxiety, of pressure to capture the true person whose life has been dissected onto hundreds of pages. It can be both helpful and limiting. And for the purposes of fiction, I decided to take what I wanted from the story arc of her life and make it fit my novel.
My mantra is:
I am not writing a story about a person.
I am writing a story in which a person appears and plays a part.
I find this attitude more freeing, less anxiety-inducing.
There was nothing to connect the real person Fleetwood Shuttleworth with real person Alice Grey, but The Familiars is based on their relationship dynamic. Why didn’t I invent a lady of the manor, who I’d have more creative freedom with? I didn’t want to, and I used all the creative freedom I wished to with Fleetwood. I was more excited to write about somebody who’d lived than somebody I’d made up. The story felt more real to me that way.
With that said, I haven’t made Charles Dickens a character in The Household. I was intimidated by the prospect, but also I simply didn’t want to. The idea bored me, and I didn’t want anybody to classify The Household as “that book about Dickens”. Likewise, Angela’s love interest is the Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley. This isn’t a secret, but he isn’t named in the book for the same reason. The spotlight is on the women here, not the famous men. There’s been enough written about both Dickens and Wellington without me adding to it.
I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m intuitive about who I write about, and not fussed about how it will be perceived. If you have an idea for a novel in which the main character is Jane Austen or Marilyn Monroe, that’s great, and I hope you won’t be put off.
You just have to be prepared to leave a lot – most, in fact – out, particularly if they are well-known and there is a lot of information about them. Fictionalising a biography isn’t a clever idea, because as well as amounting to plagiarism, people might as well just read the biography, which can often be far more gripping and engaging than a novel.
There were so many interesting things about Angela Burdett-Coutts that didn’t make it into the novel because there was no place for them. I would have loved to put in there that she gave the Duke a turtle as a present, or that her brother was estranged from the family and she met him for the first time aged 11, or that her grandfather’s wife was younger than her mother.
It is easy to think you should include as many facts as you can find about a person, but really they are only relevant if they tell you about that person’s character. Otherwise it reads like a potted biography, and unless you are including that level of detail for all characters because that’s your style, it comes across as shoehorned.
Biography as story
I will talk more about structure in another post, but another thing to consider is how much of the person’s life will be in your story. Are you following them for decades, from childhood until a specific point? Or are you focusing on one event in their lives? The former will be more of a biopic, but the latter is how I’ve approached my treatment of Angela Burdett-Coutts in The Household, which covers the setting up of the house and simultaneously a period in her decade-long experience of being stalked by a man named Richard Dunn. I find it more satisfying to focus on a snapshot of a life, an event that finds them, changes them and then leaves them.
This is getting into a different thing, but if what happens is also based on real events, it must work as a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. To achieve this, often events will bend away from the truth. That isn’t a problem. One of my pet peeves is when the top comments on a film or story based on real events or a real person is: “It didn’t happen like that/they didn’t do/say that.” So what? During the time The Household is set, Richard Dunn (the stalker) was in prison, but I needed him not to be, so I released him.
One of the things that readers say to me most often is: “I loved going away and finding out more about X/Y/Z.” Some novels are great jumping off points for a new interest or obsession. Readers don’t mind when things don’t play out exactly as they did in the real world (also, who even knows how they did?).
Being inspired by real events is not the same as being faithful to it.
And what you leave out matters just as much, if not more, than what you put in.
Next week: character building.