The Role of Real-Life Events in Fiction: Where to Draw the Line

Writers are the ultimate criminals.

We steal conversations overheard in cafes, mannerisms from people we’ve worked with, arguments from relationships, houses we’ve visited, stories told over dinner and strange little incidents we’ve witnessed and never quite forgotten. We read newspapers and wonder what happened before the journalist arrived, or what happened after the story disappeared from the headlines.

Sometimes an entire novel begins with a real event. More often, reality provides a fragment: a place, a crime, a personality, an injustice or simply a question.

What if?

There is nothing particularly unusual about this. Fiction has always drawn from life. The difficulty begins when inspiration becomes imitation, particularly when the people involved are still alive and may recognise themselves.

So where is the line?

For me, the distinction is reasonably simple: real life might spark the idea, but fiction has to give it a new shape.

Real Events Are Starting Points, Not Templates

A news story, a real event, even a historical one can contain the seed of an extraordinary novel. There are so many novels that base themselves on these events.

As they say, truth is stranger than fiction.

Someone disappears. A business collapses. A family discovers that a relative has been living a double life. A political scandal exposes something nobody was supposed to know. A seemingly ordinary crime reveals a much larger story underneath it.

The temptation is to think: There’s the plot. Usually, there isn’t. Yet, there’s the beginning of one.

Real events are frequently messy, unresolved and dramatically unsatisfying. People behave inconsistently. Important events happen by accident. Characters, or real people, enter the story and then vanish for no apparent reason. Motives remain unknown. Investigations run into dead ends. Sometimes nothing is resolved at all.

That’s life. A novel has different obligations particularly for the reader.

Readers expect cause and effect. They expect characters to have motivations they can understand, even if they disagree with them. They expect events to accumulate meaning. Most importantly, they expect the ending to have some relationship to everything that came before it.

That means the moment I take inspiration from a real event, I start changing it. Not necessarily to disguise where it came from, but to turn it into fiction.

The Question I Find More Useful

Writers sometimes ask how much they need to change before a real person becomes fictional. Change the name? The occupation? The town? Their age?

I think that’s the wrong question. A character doesn’t become fictional simply because Robert becomes Richard and his Mercedes becomes a BMW.

The more useful question is: Have I created a new person, or merely disguised the old one?

If the character still has the same history, occupation, family circumstances, distinctive appearance, personality and behaviour as the real person, changing the name achieves very little. Anyone who knows that person may still recognise them.

More importantly, the writer hasn’t done much imaginative work.

When I draw on somebody I’ve encountered, I’m generally interested in something about them rather than the whole person. It might be the way they speak. A contradiction in their personality. Their profession. A habit. The way they responded to a particular situation.

That fragment can then be combined with fragments from completely different sources. The resulting character might have one person’s occupation, another person’s manner of speaking, an invented family history and a personality that belongs to neither. At some point the original inspiration disappears. That’s usually when the character becomes interesting.

The Ethical Question Is Different from the Legal One

There are legal considerations when writing about identifiable living people, particularly if the material is damaging. Defamation and privacy laws vary between jurisdictions, and writers dealing closely with real people or allegations should obtain appropriate professional advice.

But legality isn’t the only test. Something can be legally publishable and still be unfair.

Writers have access to material other people give us without necessarily understanding that they’re giving it to us. Friends tell us about marriages. Colleagues tell us workplace stories. Families tell us secrets. People reveal things during difficult periods in their lives.

Those stories can be irresistible to a novelist. They also aren’t automatically ours. My own test is to consider whether I’m borrowing an experience or appropriating somebody else’s private life. There is a substantial difference.

I’m working on a psychological thriller at the moment. It is very loosely based on a journalist who disappeared over forty years ago investigating corruption in the property industry in an Australian city. I won’t go into more detail than that, but my story is radically different from that one in many ways but very similar in so many more.

Called Buried Truth, it is part of my Tracer mystery series in which PI Robbie Thornton is out to find the truth of the story. It is rumoured the woman was killed and buried in the foundations of a building. This the title. But the title also refers to many other truths that have been buried over the years which Thornton gradually uncovers.

So the inspiration was a real life murder but fictionalised such that the real person is not named nor are they really able to be identified. That is the secret of the “true-crime” approach..

Distance Helps

One of the simplest fictionalisation techniques is distance. So in Buried Truth, I have changed:

·       The time of the crime.

·       The circumstances (at least slightly).

·       The relationships.

·       The people involved and their relationships.

·       Who has power

Another useful technique is inversion. If a real event involved someone being betrayed, what happens if the fictional version is told from the betrayer’s point of view? What if the victim is not really murdered but has escaped? What if an apparent crime becomes something consensual? What if the person everyone assumed was innocent engineered the entire situation?

Now we’re no longer reproducing reality. We’re interrogating it. This is where fiction becomes much more interesting than camouflage.

Public Events Still Involve Private People

News stories can create another illusion: that because something has been reported publicly, everything connected with it is fair game. I’m not convinced that’s true.

A major crime may be public knowledge. The victims’ relatives didn’t necessarily choose to become public figures. Neither did witnesses, neighbours, children or people whose lives became collateral material for the story.

This becomes particularly important with tragedy.

If I’m inspired by the circumstances of a real crime, I don’t need the victim’s name, exact family, precise location and personal history as well. In fact, keeping those things often limits the fiction because the writer becomes trapped by the historical event.

Better to ask what actually interests you.

·       Is it the crime?

·       The investigative failure?

·       The psychology?

·       The social conditions surrounding it?

·       The unanswered question?

·       The institutional response?

Take that element and build something new around it.

Personal Experience Is Different Again

Writers inevitably put themselves into their work. Not necessarily autobiographically, but emotionally. Fear, grief, ambition, jealousy, embarrassment, failure, love, resentment — we’ve experienced these things, and those experiences inform how we write characters experiencing them.

I don’t see that as a problem. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine convincing fiction without it. But personal experience usually involves other people. That’s where the boundary becomes less clear.

You own your memory of an event. Someone else who experienced the same event owns theirs. Neither necessarily owns the objective truth, assuming such a thing even exists.

Writing fiction gives us a useful way through that problem. Instead of asking, How do I reproduce what happened?, ask: What did it feel like?

The circumstances can change completely while the emotional truth remains. Often that produces better fiction anyway.

Protect the Vulnerable, Not the Powerful Idea

One principle I find useful is to think about the imbalance between the writer and the person being written about. A powerful public institution can usually survive being fictionalised. A private individual who told you something in confidence may not.

The closer the material gets to trauma, illness, sexuality, family conflict, financial difficulty or allegations of wrongdoing, the more carefully I’d consider whether identifiable details are necessary. Often they aren’t.

If removing someone’s identity destroys the story, it’s worth asking whether you’re actually writing fiction at all. There are forms designed specifically for telling true stories — biography, memoir, journalism, narrative nonfiction. They come with their own ethical responsibilities. Fiction gives us something different: freedom.

We should use it.

Let Reality Light the Match

Some of my favourite ideas have begun with something real. Take the question from real life. Take the emotion. Take the contradiction, the injustice, the strange coincidence or the tiny observation that made you stop and think. Then invent.

Protect people who never volunteered to become your characters. Change enough that you’re creating rather than disguising. Remember that public knowledge and ethical permission aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Most importantly, don’t let reality become a cage. Real life might give us the spark. Fiction gives it shape.

Happy writing and reading.

Des Brady

Aussie Crime and Thriller Writer