Not my story to tell

When you write a story, it's natural to have the desire to write from experience.  In most cases the experiences we draw on when writing are our own, with the exception of biographical works which centre around the life and the experience of an individual.  When it comes to narrative fiction however it is inevitable that you will create characters that are the furthest thing from your own persona and your own thought processes as you can get.  These characters can be entirely fictitious if we have the depth of reasoning, imagination, and creativity needed to fill out those characters and develop them to a point where they are realistic, not necessarily in the physical sense but in an emotional sense.

My life has been interesting; in the 32 years that I have been alive there have been a lot of things that happened to me that you probably wouldn't expect someone my age to have been through by now, from health scares, near death experiences, trauma, all in the negative through to wealth, fortune, fortitude, and success in the positive.  Having said all of that, I have had the pleasure of meeting many people who have lived lives that are much more eventful than my own.  When it comes to creating characters that diverge significantly from my own mentality there is a tendency I have to base those characters on archetypes that I have developed.  These archetypes are informed by the experiences of others, often people with a similar storyline in their own lives.  The result is that I create characters where the people I know who fit those archetypes could be cast in the role and their performance one would hope would come effortlessly as they are essentially based on them if they were put in those positions and how I think they would react.

All of this is fine and interesting when you are writing about concepts and situations that are alien or disconnected from the actual lives those people lead.  If however there comes a point where the path of the fictional character crosses that of the real world individual that they are loosely based on, you reach a muddy, murky body water that you have to wade through.  That body of water is essentially your attempt to blindly navigate a fictional storyline that does not reveal the real world experience of that individual.  This isn't always a case of forethought and betrayal of confidence, although both of these are issues, where an individual confides in you about their experience and you have the desire to incorporate it into the life of your fictional characters.  It can actually be a case where your imagine hits too close to home and through no fault with no malicious intent you happen to write a story about a fictional character that captures quite closely the experience of that individual.

Let's climb out of the swamp for a moment and try to tell this story in a more specific way.  I have a friend who has lived a fascinating life, not least of all for the fact that it is quite literally a miracle that she is still alive today as she was told many times, by many different medical professionals she had months and in some cases only weeks to live.  I can't tell you exactly why this was the case because that would betray her confidence which I am not willing to do.  She demonstrates for me something that many writers struggle with, that is the muddy path we must walk between reality and fantasy.  I write about characters with complex backgrounds, many of the stories I have written have never been published for the simple reason that on reflection they capture too closely the real life experiences of people I know, this woman in particular is one example.

It's not all doom and gloom for my friend for those of you who may be concerned, her story arc is one of trauma and strife which gets incredibly dark but there is a redemption and salvation arc which brings us about to where she is today, happy, which like many people I know is "enough" as long as they are happy they can be content because they have been to the opposing extreme.

As a writer, not only the lived experiences of people you know but also as a reader the lived experiences of fictional characters also inform your internalised concept of individuality.  The archetypes I mentioned before tend to emerge from the groups of real world people you meet and the observation of similarities in personality and behaviour over time that leads you to the conclusion that those people are all part of the same archetype.  Indeed when it comes to Psychology, one of the most prevalent systems used to categorise or classify people in this way is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator developed by mother and daughter Katharine Cook Briggs, and Isabel Briggs Myers.  The Myers-Briggs Type indicator today consists of 16 distinct personality types that are demarcated by four binary variables, the result is a 4 letter acronym that sums up your personality type.  For me this flips back and forth between INTP and INFP.  If you would like a more in depth explanation or you would like to know your own type you can find out more at myersbriggs.org

Whilst real world individuals conform mostly to these 16 personality types, those personality types depicted in fiction are summed up by literary tropes.  This is a topic of itself I will cover in much more depth another time but suffice is to say that in the thousands of years that the written word has existed, through countless stories that have been written, the same themes and the same basic story-lines emerge time and again.  As a writer the holy grail is the pursuit of 100% originality, that is, the creation of a literary work that is "pure" that has not been informed by any other literary work, that draws no parallels, and tells a story in its entirety that has never been told before.  The trouble is the comparison with the Holy Grail is quite apt in that no substantial evidence exists that such a thing has ever truly existed - I am aware of the hate this will trigger from those who vehemently hold the contrary to be true and that's okay, you can consider me an outlier, you don't need to convince me it's real, what is important here is the concept itself regardless of the question of underlying substance or lack thereof.

If you attempt to write a piece of fiction that includes a character that has no parallel at all with anything that has ever been written before, it probably wouldn't be interesting - I would like to be proved wrong, feel free to comment below if you think you can.  It would also likely prove to lack engagement because no-one who read it would have any affinity to the character.  Some of the most successful literary works incorporate a wealth of characters, not just because the need arises through plot, but because the more bases covered the better the chance that your reader will find someone within the narrative that they can relate to.  It's therefore important to write characters that will behave in a way that real people actually would behave, even if the setting is entirely fictional or even surreal depicting situations that no-one will ever find themselves within.

So you find yourself with a wealth of knowledge detailing the life experiences of both real and fictional people; when it comes to fiction if you draw too close a parallel there is the issue of plagiarism that arises, that is the legal theft of the intellectual property or copyright of another creator.  When it comes to the real lives of people you know, there comes the issue of authority, both in the legal sense for example whether a biography is authorised or unauthorised, but also in the ideological sense.  You can choose to try to avoid writing characters informed by this wealth of knowledge entirely but as above this would likely prove difficult.  

Ultimately the real question is whether or not the story is yours to tell in the first place.  If you choose to tell a story that is based on the real life of another person you really only have two choices, one is to get their permission and then write with as much realism or as little as they are comfortable with.  The other option is to write without their permission which in the legal sense requires sticking as close to fact and declared speculation as you can get or risk being sued for libel.  I do not like that option personally but some people do choose to pursue that path as a career.  I choose to write stories that are not based in real life, or at least they are set in environments that are removed from reality so that the possible parallels are minimal.  The only way you can really ensure that your work doesn't plagiarise another or drawn too closely on the real life experience of another individual is to have an editor who can do that for you - you can do it yourself but the volume of published work on the market at this point makes that rather difficult, and it is often the case that this process isn't entirely manual, it can be automated.