Dynamic Characters (13 page)

PRECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES:

SOME FAMOUS CHARACTERS BASED ON REAL PEOPLE

Basing fictional characters on real people has a long and distinguished history. In
David Copperfield,
Charles Dickens based Mr. Micawber on his own feckless father, John Dickens. Scarlett O'Hara's life story drew on that of Margaret Mitchell's grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, who survived the burning of Atlanta and went on to rebuild the family farm. In
Dodsworth,
Sinclair Lewis based his exploitive and selfish character Fran Dodsworth on his first wife—an interesting form of post-marital revenge also employed by Lady Caroline Lamb in
Glenarvon
and by Nora Ephron in
Heartburn.
A trio of famous dreamers—Jay Gatsby, Don Quixote and Alice in Wonderland—like-wise all began as people their authors knew.

When such models recognized their fictional counterparts, there was a variety of consequences. Irascible critic Alexander Woollcott saw himself as the irascible protagonist in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's play
The Man Who Came to Dinner.
Woollcott was so delighted that he toured with the play. On the other hand, Truman Capote's jet-set friends were so undelighted to recognize themselves in ''La Cote Basque'' that some of them never spoke to Capote again.

Consequences can be legal as well as social. An important libel case in California,
Bindrim v. Mitchell
(1979), resulted from novelist Gwen Davis Mitchell portraying in her novel
Touching
a character who conducted nude therapy sessions. She was sued by Dr. Paul Bindrim, a therapist who did just that. Even though Mitchell's fictional protagonist differed in several important ways from Bindrim, Mitchell lost the case. Bindrim was awarded a substantial settlement.

THINK FIRST, WRITE LATER: SIX MODEL QUESTIONS

Acts have consequences, and writing is an act. But you can at least minimize the personal and legal risks by forethought (we'll consider the literary risks in a moment). Ask yourself the following six questions before you borrow Aunt Minnie.

Is What I'm Writing Actually Libelous?

Libel laws vary from state to state; there is no federal law. However, various federal court cases have built up a body of defamation law through interpreting the freedoms of speech and of the press. State courts are bound by United States Supreme Court pronouncements, but in the constantly changing area of libel, this can still create differences among the states in deciding what is libelous and what is not. You can look up individual state statutes in the library.

The strictest interpretations may find you libelous if the real-life model for your character can prove:

• your character was recognizable as the model by members of the reading public,
and

• the character was portrayed negatively,
and

• as a result the model was injured professionally, emotionally or financially

These are the grounds on which therapist Bindrim won his case against novelist Mitchell in California. However, other states have ruled differently on similar cases.

You probably can't be successfully sued if:

• you disguise Aunt Minnie so completely that not even all her family agrees that your character is her

• you stick to the publicly documented, unembellished truth (If Aunt Minnie's conviction(s) for theft are a matter of public record,

and if you don't add any made-up, unflattering elements to her portrait, you're probably on legally safe ground.) • you say only positive things about the character (If your protagonist is based on your friend Karl, and you portray Karl as an absolute prince, he cannot claim your portrayal defamed him.)

Is Aunt Minnie a Public Figure?

The courts have allowed considerably more leeway to authors writing about public figures than to those writing about private citizens. Don DeLillo's novel
Libra,
for instance, gave Richard Nixon an extremely unflattering character. But even if Aunt Minnie qualifies as a private citizen, she still has to prove malice on your part in order to successfully sue. She has to prove that you published private, damaging facts that are identifiably about her.

Is Aunt Minnie Dead?

Most states—but, again, not all—hold that a dead person can't be libeled. Maybe Aunt Minnie's story will gain in richness and power if you mull it over for another decade.

If I
Am
Sued, Who Will Bear the Legal Expenses?

Almost always, you will.

Most novel contracts contain lengthy paragraphs in which you agree that you haven't libeled anyone, or if you have, it's your financial problem. It's also important in this context to remember that anyone can initiate a lawsuit for libel, no matter how unfounded. The case may well be thrown out of court, but by the time it is, you may have already incurred some legal expenses.

Whose Feelings Will Be Hurt by This Book, and How Much?

Here we leave the realm of legal consequences and enter into social ones. Obviously, this is a personal question. Some writers base characters on real models and trust that the model will understand, not care or never see the story. (I know several authors who do not want their landlord, mother or ex-lover to ever read specific works. The writers are not sure what they'll say if the respective models ever do get hold of the books.)

Other writers take the stance that both life and art involve pain,

and to write honestly is worth whatever conflicts this causes, including estrangement from friends and relatives. (J.P. Donleavy went so far as to say that unless at least three people sue you after the publication of your first novel, you haven't been honest enough.) Still others work hard to make sure that their models are unrecognizable in the final draft, protecting themselves from lawsuits
and
Aunt Minnie from embarrassment.

How Much Can I Disguise Aunt Minnie— and How Much Disguise Is Enough?

There are no hard and fast rules about how much you need to change a character to protect yourself from successful legal action. However, merely changing the name is not sufficient. Changing a character's sex, locale, profession and family connections may or may not be sufficient: Is the character still recognizable? To whom? Would a jury think so? You can't be sure. Thus, the more you change, the legally safer you'll be. On the other hand, if you make Aunt Minnie not a kleptomaniac but an arsonist, make her husband not a lawyer but a dairy farmer, and her fate not to end as an antiques dealer but in a rest home, is this still the story you wanted to tell? Your goal was to disguise the model, not obliterate her.

MORE THAN A FAKE MUSTACHE: HOW TO DISGUISE CHARACTERS

Preliminary concerns are to change the model's name, appearance, hometown, etc. This is easy to do. It's also minor, compared to restructuring the model's unique personality.

Fortunately, that sort of basic restructuring may actually
strengthen
your story. This is because real live people contain masses of contradictions, unprocessed experiences, confused motivations and simultaneous emotions. In the space of five minutes, a human being can experience many memories, impulses (some acted on, some not), feelings, goads of conscience, insecurities, wishes, frustrations, old angers—even if outwardly all she's doing is standing by the stove frying bacon. If you could somehow get
all
of this into your novel, it would be exactly like real life.

But fiction is not real life. Fiction, as we saw in the chapter on dialogue, is the act of compressing real life in order to express something meaningful about it. To do that, those elements that contribute to the meaning are highlighted; those that are irrelevant are edited out.

In your novel about Aunt Minnie, for instance, you might emphasize her competitiveness (she wants what her friends have, even if she has to steal it), but downplay her love of gardening and her bad temper. You will have simplified Aunt Minnie for the sake of the story. You will also have taken the first step in the process of disguising her: subtracting some traits. Choose the ones that don't contribute to your overall plot. This will give greater prominence to those traits that do contribute. (Note: We've now moved from a character's external traits to her internal ones: What Makes Minnie Run. That's why this chapter is the last one in part one. It's a bridge to part two, where we'll consider your character's psychological innards.)

The next step is to
add
personality elements that will strengthen the story's meaning. Perhaps the real Aunt Minnie is a gregarious person. She has many friends, one current and two ex-husbands and six kids. However, kleptomania feels lonely to
you.
The more you think about it, the more you sense a connection between social isolation and the need to make pathetic connections through pointless theft. So you make your fictional Aunt Minnie friendless, with a workaholic husband who ignores her and one grown son wrapped up in his own life. That change, in turn, suggests others. Minnie steals different kinds of things than your real aunt does, because she's meeting different needs. She steals from different sorts of places, in different ways. She displays her booty differently.

The fictional Minnie thus becomes a different person from the original. Some traits are highlighted, some deleted, some added. Her "disguise,'' it should be noted, is not at all superficial, not the equivalent of a fake mustache and dark wig. The disguise consists of genuine changes, growing out of the needs of the story itself as it evolved in your mind. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that Jay Gatsby started as a man Fitzgerald knew, ''but then became himself.''

So can Aunt Minnie.

ANOTHER WAY TO DISGUISE CHARACTERS

An alternate approach is to combine two or more real-life models. Many writers do this. Literary historian William Amos has this to say about Anthony Trollope's famous fictional prime minister and hero of a book series, Plantagenet Palliser:

For his patriotic tenacity, honesty, and modesty, Palliser is supposedly modeled upon Lord Palmerston. His candor and lack of social graces are believed to come from Lord John Russell, a poor mixer and of a retiring nature. Something of this stiffness of demeanor is also probably derived from Edward Henry Stanley, Fifteenth Earl of Derby. Trollope was a member of the committee of Royal Literary Fund, over which Stanley presided. The Earl considered him to be incorrigibly middle class.

Maybe Aunt Minnie could be both disguised as a person and strengthened as a character by combining her with your next-door neighbor, a woman over whom loneliness hangs like mist. You might use the neighbor's timid manner and speech patterns, Minnie's stealing and your dentist's unexpectedly biting jokes. Does that work?

A variation of this approach is to combine characteristics of the model with aspects of your own personality. Nearly all writers, to some degree, depend on their inner lives to fuel their fiction. You have probably never, for instance, committed a murder. Yet you know what it's like to feel angry enough that you
want
to kill somebody, and from that emotion you create the thoughts of a murderer.

Similarly, when the fictional Minnie feels lonely, her loneliness will inevitably have the flavor of your own. Since this process is going to go on anyway, exploit it for purposes of disguise. Where can you graft aspects of yourself onto Minnie? Where might the plot be able to use them?

THE FINAL DECISION

Basing characters on real people can be a great starting point. However, it is only a starting point. For literary as well as legal reasons, you'll want to augment, modify and heighten the original. If you do a good enough job of this, it's possible that Aunt Minnie won't even recognize herself in the finished work. (Seventy-two different women claimed to be the model for one of Honoree de Balzac's heroines!)

It's also possible that she will recognize herself, and you'll have to deal with the consequences. Should you write the story anyway? That's up to you. Consider, however, that your decision may confer or withhold immortality on someone else. Would the world now recognize the names Tom Blankenship, Delphine Delamare or Dr. Joseph Dillon? Well, it recognizes their fictional counterparts. And so would you.
¹

SUMMARY: BASING CHARACTERS ON REAL PEOPLE

• To successfully sue for libel, a plaintiff must prove that your character is recognizably based on her, is a negative portrait and has injured her emotionally, socially or financially.

• You have more leeway in writing about a public figure or a dead person than about a living private citizen.

• Avoid legal action and strengthen your novel by disguising characters in substantial ways.

• Strengthen those traits that highlight the story's meaning, and delete those that do not. Let the character evolve in your mind.