Using Real People for Characters

From time to time I have a friend ask me to put them in a novel. Or to just use their name. Or to make my villain their ex-boyfriend. My response has always been the same over the last four years. Not a chance. They usually huff and wheedle, hoping to pressure me into it, but I stand firm because I have made that mistake and it cost me dearly. Sometimes even as thick headed as I am, I only have to make a mistake once to learn a lesson.

Back in 2002, when I quit my job to write a novel, I used my oldest friend’s name in my first book at her request. We’d been friends since middle school and I love her to death, so I never thought twice about which character ended up with her name. My friend – we’ll call her B – had an unusual name, one of those Southern last-names-for-first-names kinds of things. While HOT VISIONS was a single title, I had three stories total planned about three friends who had psychic powers. I named B one of the three without really thinking through which one. The women all had quirks. They were part of a Survivor’s Club, using friendship and ultimately love to overcome their issues. You can’t exactly overcome stuff unless you’ve got some room to grow.

But while I saw my friend as a savvy, together, strong woman, the truth turned out to be far from that. I put B’s name on the friend who was dating an abusive guy, never thinking that my girlfriend’s marriage, which had seemed so wonderful, had turned for the worst. B’s husband hadn’t beaten her or ignored her or verbally abused her. But he couldn’t stop lying about everything, big and small. He’d dragged them into debt and lied about it until there was no more hiding. Right before my girlfriend called – not to congratulate me on my book release as I’d expected, but to tear me to pieces for casting her as the “idiot friend who had no sense when it came to men” – she found out that her husband had even lied about being a Navy Seal, buying his medals on e-bay. He’d left his job telling them he had cancer so he could get a severance package. He owed his first wife massive amounts of back child support. The list went on and on and the consequences were devastating. B’s whole life was crumbling before her eyes.

I had no idea.

I don’t blame her for not telling me. While we’d kept in touch, I’d turned inward those first years after I started writing and had become a hermit. And I’m sure she was overwhelmed and embarrassed. When she finally confided in me, it was only as an explanation for why she’d gone crazy about my book. To her, I’d put her name on that character because I thought B was a fool when it came to men. Further she felt like I named the paralegal after her (when the other two women were attorneys) because I thought she hadn’t done anything with her life. To say she felt hurt and angry would be an understatement. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking back on those early days when I wrote HOT VISIONS, and I vaguely remember putting her name on the blond friend because B has blond hair. In my own mind, she was as far away from that character as she could get.

Through this event I learned a great lesson. We never know what’s going on in the very private lives of our friends. Their deepest, darkest, most closely guarded secrets are the ones they will see in my books, because that’s human nature. When someone reads a story with a character who has their name, they will look for similarities and reasons why the author named THAT character their name. If the character is shallow, could that mean that they are shallow? Those kinds of thoughts can eat you alive. So no more naming characters real life friends’ names, even if they beg for their name to be in a book. I did put one of my old bosses in the book SECRET OBSESSION because his quirkiness was just too good to pass up, but I had a reader email to say that part of the book was unbelievable. No one would have a boss who was a national couples roller-skating dance champion…

If you’d like to read an excerpt from the books I talk about here, come on over to my website, http://www.leighwyndfield.com/ and take a peek. I sold this story to LooseID publishing after its initial printing and was able to change B’s name. When I told her, she said, “thank god!” I knew then that despite the hours of conversation where I reassured her I hadn’t thought of her when I developed that character, she’d never really believed me.