Can You Put Someone Who Wronged You in Your Novel?

Turning someone who wronged you into a character is one of the oldest pleasures of writing. Most of it is harmless. Some of it could cost a writer everything they own.

A meme made the rounds in a big writers’ group this week. “When someone is mean to you, but you’re a writer, so you turn them into a cautionary tale.” Under it, a woman behind bars, saying, “And now everyone will know what they’ve done to me.”

The comments were a confession booth. One writer said the chairman of her local book club is very hostile, so she turned her into an unattractive, dishonest, savage woman in one of her books.

A man said that fifty-five years ago he worked with someone he came to dislike, and he finally killed him off in his latest novel. There’s no time limit on revenge, he said. Someone else had written a neighbor who ignored her into a story. Another writer said she’s still going to kill off a woman in her novel even though she doesn’t care about her anymore. One author wrote that so many people in the group had been in her books. So many.

Someone mentioned the old story that a famous children’s author based a cruel teacher on a real one. One writer offered the perfect disclaimer: “Any similarity to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental, except Jerry. He’s a jerk.” And one quiet voice in the thread reminded everyone not to forget the disclaimer.

Is it legal to put a real person in your novel?

Often, yes. Novelists borrow from real people all the time: a laugh, a habit, a way of standing in a doorway, the boss everybody had. Fiction is built from that. The trouble starts when a character is recognizable as one real person and the book says something false and damaging about them.

Defamation doesn’t stop being defamation because it’s in a novel. If people who know the real person would read the character and think “that’s him,” and the book shows him doing things that harm his reputation and that he never did, you may have a problem. A different name doesn’t solve it. A different hair color doesn’t solve it. Can the people around him tell it’s him? That’s the test.

If a real person could see themselves in your villain, have a publishing lawyer read the book before it goes out.

Does a fiction disclaimer protect you from a lawsuit?

No. Not by itself.

The “any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” line is a statement of intent. It doesn’t erase a resemblance that’s obviously there. Say the book club chairman in your novel runs a book club in a town just like yours. She has the same job, the same car and the same habit of interrupting everyone. The disclaimer is a sign on the door of a house everyone can see inside.

The classic case is a California libel suit from 1979, Bindrim v. Mitchell. A novelist attended a real therapist’s nude encounter group sessions, then wrote a novel featuring a therapist who ran the same kind of group. She changed his name and his appearance. The court still found that people who knew him could recognize him, and he won his libel case against her and her publisher. Writers and publishers have been nervous about recognizable characters ever since.

The joke disclaimer from the thread, the one that exempts Jerry, is funny because everyone knows what it means. So would a jury.

Why do writers put people who hurt them into stories?

Because it works, at least on the page. A villain built from someone who wronged you comes with real details: the exact tone of voice, the small cruelties, the way they made you feel. Readers can tell. Writing what you know includes writing the jerks and bullies you know, as one writer in the thread put it.

It’s also satisfying, and there’s nothing wrong with admitting that. Another writer compared it to thinking up the perfect comeback ten minutes too late. You finally get to say it, even if only on paper.

Writers have done it for centuries. Dante put real people he despised into his Inferno, by name, and some of them were still alive when he wrote it. That’s literary history now. In his own day it was something else.

What are you after? If you want a realistic villain, the real person is source material. If you want everyone to know what they did to you, the novel is a weapon, and weapons have a way of going off in the wrong direction.

I’ve never done it myself. When I’ve written about the people who hurt me, I’ve done it as nonfiction, under my own name, in my autobiographies.

What happens when the real person reads your novel?

Sometimes nothing. Many people never read the books written about them, and many who do never recognize themselves, because people rarely see themselves as the villain.

Sometimes a lot. I learned how strongly people react to seeing themselves on the page when I mailed a 2,000-page autobiography to twelve relatives. My father told every one of them to burn it, disowned me and stopped talking to me except when he wanted something. I wrote about it in the fear of being judged for your memoir. That was nonfiction, about my own life. Fiction designed to punish someone gets a worse reaction, because the person recognizes both themselves and the intent.

And what about the people around them? A coworker who recognizes the book club chairman in your novel will believe the dishonest, savage version of her a little, even knowing it’s fiction. Defamation law exists for exactly that harm. “It’s just a story” doesn’t settle anything.

How do you safely base a character on someone you know?

Keep the behavior. Change everything else.

Take what made that person memorable as a character: the way they belittled people in meetings, the fake laugh, the habit of taking credit. Then build a different person around it. Change the gender, the age, the job, the setting, the appearance, the history. Put the behavior in a different world. If you can describe the character to someone who knows the real person and they don’t think of anyone in particular, you’re in good shape.

Combine people.

A composite of three bad bosses is harder to recognize than one bad boss with a new name, and usually a richer character.

Don’t invent crimes.

Giving a recognizable person a sex scandal, a drug habit or a murder they never committed is the fastest route to a lawsuit. Unpleasant behavior they really showed is one thing. Inventing new and worse behavior and attaching it to someone people can identify is another.

And be honest with yourself about why you’re doing it.

If the point of the book is to hurt someone, you’ll make choices that make them easier to recognize, because recognition is what you want. That’s when writers get into trouble. I talk most clients out of revenge books for exactly this reason, and I’ve covered it in the revenge memoir: who shouldn’t write one.

Is fiction safer than memoir for writing about real people?

Somewhat, if you do it right. A novel gives you room to change names, merge people, move events and invent scenes. That distance protects both you and them. I’ve described a novel based on your own life as putting your story into witness protection: new name, new town, new faces, same person underneath. More in ghostwriting a novel based on your own life.

But witness protection only works if nobody recognizes the walk. If you keep every identifying detail and change only the name, you’ve written a memoir with a costume on it, and you’ve lost the protection of truth along the way. In a memoir, truth is a strong defense. In a novel full of invented scenes about a recognizable person, you’ve told the world some of it didn’t happen.

If you’re writing about family or people you know in a memoir, read writing about family without a lawsuit and permissions, release forms and libel insurance before you publish.

Should you write the revenge story at all?

Write it. Then decide what to publish.

Getting the story down can do you a lot of good, the same way writing a furious letter you never send does. Put the real person in it, real name and all, in the first draft. Say everything you wish you’d said. Then, when it’s time to revise for publication, turn them into a character. Most of the anger survives the disguise. The book usually gets better too. A character built for the story serves the story, and a grudge only serves itself.

One writer in the thread had the healthiest version of all. She used to do this, she said, but she’s decided some villains are better handled by letting them go and find their own consequences. The writing hub has more on building characters, and if you’d like help turning a real story into fiction that protects you, my book coaching covers that. Write the villain you know. Just make sure the jury wouldn’t know him too.

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