The Ultimate Balancing Act: Using Family and Friends in Fiction
Czeslaw Milosz famously wrote, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
It’s a famous quote for good reason. Many writers will tell you they relentlessly mine their family’s experiences in order to inform their fiction. Sometimes, that process of translating real experiences into fiction can have spectacular consequences—more than one family isn’t on speaking terms because of a novel or memoir that reveals a little too much.
With crime fiction, that quote can potentially take an even darker turn. What if a family has a deep, murderous secret that a writer chooses to reveal, albeit through the thin disguise of a novel? And let’s not forget the crime novelists—famous and not-so-famous—who turned out to be actual murderers.
On a much less dramatic level, there’s also the tension that emerges when writers merely weave some of their family’s real-life mannerisms, quirks, and backstories into their fictional characters. The writer will argue that doing so makes their characters seem more real, and besides, it’s not like any readers will actually recognize the real-life inspirations. The family might just be embarrassed.
When I was writing “Boise Longpig Hunting Club” and its new sequel, “Rattlesnake Rodeo,” I pulled quite a bit from real life. My sister-in-law once worked as a bounty hunter, and I used some of her stories to inform the character of Jake, a former soldier turned bounty hunter turned fugitive. A good friend of mine was a solider for more than ten years, and I used some of his stories, modified appropriately, to build out Jake’s backstory.
I could be wrong, but to the best of my knowledge, neither of them have read either book. And to be fair, I did my best to fuzz out as many real-life details as possible, while keeping the emotional truth of their stories intact. Because that’s the aspect of Milosz’s quote that often goes unmentioned—many writers are all too aware of the damage they can potentially cause, and do everything possible to avoid it (short of not actually using the material, of course). When a writer is born into a family, the family might be finished—and then the writer might be finished.
It’s all a balancing act. As a writer, you can’t let fear of what others may think determine your writing—it’ll strangle your creativity. But your writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum, either; you either edit to mitigate any offense, or you prepare yourself for the potential consequences.
As I was writing “Rattlesnake Rodeo,” though, I told myself there was one area of real-life inspiration that a family was unlikely to care about: Using a fictional version of a relative’s actual house. I needed a place for a nighttime stalk followed by a shootout, and this house had the ideal layout. When I wrote the scene, I didn’t change a thing—you could walk around the property, and from room to room, based on my description of the fictional equivalent. It’s the best kinetic scene I’ve ever written, I think.
To that one relative: I’m sorry I shot up your place (on paper, at least). But trust me, it was for a good cause.
No comments yet.