Based on a Real Person

In my career as an editor, I came to realize that the “these characters are based on no living people, living or dead” found in the beginning of only some books is, in many cases, nonsense. 

Of course, no writer writes in a void.  We all pick up ideas from our surroundings: from the people with whom we interact, the places we go, the jobs we work, and the books we read.  Where the wonderful diversity in writing comes from is in how we process these factors.  Take three professional gardeners, male, 30 years old, residents of Butte, Montana, married with two children and have them all read The Lord of the Rings and then write an original short story . . . and you will get three very different stories with perhaps a few connecting elements.

I am the middle of three sisters, separated from the eldest by 1.5 years and the youngest by 2.5 years.  We grew up in the same household, read many of the same books, and wrote.  We have approximately equal levels of intelligence and native writing talent, although I have done by far the most to develop that talent by writing most prolifically.  All of us write fantasy sometimes, but that fantasy is vastly different—not only in basic subject, but in the language we use, the descriptions, the settings, the characters, and so on.

But that’s not where I was going with this.  Where I was going was the phenomenon of basing characters off real people.  Since we don’t live in a void, everyone must necessarily take real life elements and recombine them; but some writers explicitly base characters on real people and some writers do not.

A writing friend of mine and I had a long discussion about this several years ago.  She is the sort of writer who loves basing characters on real people—indeed, does so almost exclusively.  There is practically no character in any of her books not based on a real person.  But contrast, nearly none of my characters are based on real people.  I find that trying to base a character on a real person (and I’ve tried this; some people are just so interesting they need to be written about—or I need some catharsis after dealing with them) makes it impossible for me to write them.  I get stuck in a box, unable to move creatively in directions untrue to the original person but not knowing the original person deeply enough to be interesting.

What sort of writer are you, if you do write—and if not, which do you think you would be?  And why?