To clone or not to clone…? #MFRWauthor

By cloning here, I mean using traits of friends or family as part of your characters’ personalities. It’s a touchy thing, for sure!

I wrote a blog post years ago about five of us friends working at a company in New Jersey. I felt so close to these women—they were work sisters. One of the group died of cancer at a very young age and I wrote about how I’d first met them (they were already a working team when I joined). My first impressions were of “a blonde,” a “woman with big hair and pictures painted on her nails,” and “an aloof woman who I thought hated me.” That was exactly how I pictured them when we first met. I didn’t know them. I didn’t yet know how smart, caring, beautiful they all were, inside and out. That wasn’t the point of the blog post, either, but when they read it and responded, I had to see the post from their perspective. One woman wrote and asked was her hair really that big? Another asked “So I guess I’m the aloof one?” I felt terrible!

Now granted, a blog post isn’t the same as using friends as a basis for a book character, but the result can be the same. I have a friend whose friends asked her to make them characters in one of her books. She used different  names but some physical and personality features as secondary characters, and two out of three were angry over how she’d portrayed them. They didn’t like the parts in the book she assigned them, didn’t like how she portrayed their personalities, didn’t like… Well, you get the picture.

Another friend told me that she based a cheater and womanizer on a former boyfriend and that he would recognize himself immediately. I advised her against going that route! No need making enemies on purpose when life throws enough roadblocks our way to begin with.

In Passionate Destiny, I broke that rule. I used a former boss as the basis for Margaret. If he read the book (which I’m certain he did not), he would have recognized himself in a skinny minute. The difference is, he would have laughed! He was the nicest man in the world, but he did have a snobbish side and he wasn’t afraid to show it. That’s what I drew on for Margaret as she moved from a professorship at a New Jersey college to rural Virginia, where people have to pump their own gas and folks chat at the grocery check-out counter. So maybe the trick in having characters resemble friends or family is to be sure they have the temperament to laugh at themselves.

We all view people around us—their looks, their quirks, their actions—as fodder for rich characterization for our books. We can’t help it! But when it comes to those closest to us, maybe have a talk about what you have planned before writing.

Read the next blog in the blog hop by going here.

Dee
Only a Good Man Will Do: Seriously ambitious man seeks woman to encourage his goals, support his (hopeful) position as Headmaster of Westover Academy, and be purer than Caesar’s wife. Good luck with that!

Naval Maneuvers: When a woman requires an earth-shattering crush of pleasure to carry her away, she can’t do better than to call on the US Navy. Sorry, Marines!