On Being Sued

Or worrying about it

Is it okay to base characters on real people?

This was the question that came up most often during the Starting to Write week.

When you’ve been writing for a while, and strangers know you and and meet you as a writer — and therefore have fair warning that you might be observing them, taking notes — you can easily forget what a big block this is, for some people.

People who aren’t yet entirely sure they want to be writers. People who still find fictionalisation a bit iffy. People who are surrounded by people for whom story means lie.

Can I base my story on something actually true?

There was a general anxiety, among the beginning writers at the Hurst, about two things that might possibly happen —

First, that friends and family would recognise themselves on the page, and would get very upset or angry.

Second, that someone would sue.

In my experience, there is an inverse relation between the level of people’s concern with legal matters and the likelihood of them coming into play.

Hence those submissions to short story competitions with elaborate copyright declarations included at the bottom of every page.

And hence the fear that an aunt or brother-in-law, on finding an identifiable version of themselves in an unpublished novel, would immediately think of lawyering up, rather than being flattered, amused or performatively unbothered.

Given how difficult it is to get anyone to read anything, even if they are your closest blood relations, this seems like a false fear.

In almost every case, this worry is just the writerly equivalent of that dream where you go shopping naked, and everyone looks at you, and points.

Only very rarely (Baby Reindeer) does a piece of writing become enough of a success to make the writer enough of a success for them to be worth suing.

This is not to say you should feel free to be extravagantly cruel, in fiction or non-fiction, to people with whom you hope to remain friendly, or at least civil.

Libel laws exist and are used.

But if you are writing a first draft of something you’re not yet sure is a memoir, a novel or a first foray into a subject area based on your own past — now is not the time to be paranoid.

Use people’s real names.

Describe actual events as precisely or imprecisely as will allow you to bring them to life on the page.

Let memory and imagination and research and wish-fulfilment run a relay race, if that’s what gets the baton around the track and over the finish line.

Getting something written, even if no-one else ever reads it — that’s always the first job.

If you don’t feel your manuscript or your laptop are secure and safely private, you should do whatever you must to make them so.

And if this isn’t possible, set up a new, secret email address and mail what you’ve written to that — then delete the original. Just don’t forget the password.

Changes to real details can come later. (That’s if you decide to make a much revised draft public, and have the opportunity to do so.) A name with a similar sound pattern can replace the original. A character’s hair, height, way of speaking and gender identity can be altered. In extremis, you can relocate the whole thing to Madeupland or 1932.

These disguises may mean that you never quite feel that what you’ve published is right, that it’s true. Instead, it’s a jink to the side of where it should be.

Chances are, no-one will ever even start to sense this but you.

Alternatively, or perhaps also, you can give an unpublished draft of what you’ve written to all the people concerned, the originals.

If you’ve written them honestly, they should respond fairly.

But of course you know them better than I do.