Beta Readers

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by Joe Moore

Recently, we received an email from Beth MacKinney, one of a TKZ friends, asking the question: “I’d like to know what guided questions an author can give to her beta readers to get the most helpful feedback from them.” I posted a blog on beta readers back in March, 2011. Below is a revised version of that blog to answer Beth’s question. Since many of my TKZ blog mates also use beta readers, I’m sure they will chime in with additional thoughts and tips.

A lot of writers including myself rely on beta readers to scrub our WIP and find all the plotting holes, mistakes, and general stuff that doesn’t work. So what is a beta reader? Should you go looking for one? How do you find and qualify them? How do they differ from a critique group? What are the things to look for in their feedback?

The term beta comes from software designers who use the term alpha and beta for different stages of program development. Alpha is the rawest stage—incomplete and untested—and beta is still under development but a small number of copies are released to the public for testing. In novel writing, this might be the first completed version of the manuscript where the author has made at least one pass through to edit and tweak.

A beta reader is someone whose opinion you value, who’ll take the time to read your manuscript in a timely manner, and who’ll give you an honest assessment of your work. For starters, I would mark off your list of potential beta readers anyone who is related to you, works with you, or lives in your immediate neighborhood.

Should you utilize a beta reader(s)? It depends on whether you’re working on your first unpublished manuscript or are further along in your writing career. Most beginning authors are searching for anything that will build up their ego and confidence, and keep their hopes alive. And most new authors have manuscripts that are littered with flaws and mistakes—it’s part of the learning process. Weak or unqualified feedback from others can cause a new writer to become confused and/or discouraged. And their hopes and dreams can be crushed by negative feedback. Or their egos are so artificially inflated that negative criticism can cause friendships and relationships to crash.

At the same time, established authors know the value of real, honest, sincere feedback and will react in a professional, business-like manner. Beta readers are a solid tool toward writing a better book.

In recruiting beta readers, try to line up at least three to four that are willing to take the time to not only read your work but give you constructive feedback. It’s also good to mix male and female readers. In general, try to find age-appropriate readers that are familiar with your genre. A female teen may not give you the feedback you’re looking for if your manuscript is male action/adventure. If you write YA, a retired senior citizen might not be the best choice, either.

Try to choose beta readers who are not acquainted with one another. And they don’t have to be your best friends. In fact, casual acquaintances could work better since there might not be a hesitation that they will hurt your feelings if they don’t like what you’ve written. There’s a good chance they’ll take the whole process more seriously than a relative or close friend.

Don’t ask your beta readers to line edit your manuscript. Tell them to ignore the typos and grammar issues. What you’re interested in is: Does the story work? Does it hold together? Are the characters believable? Can you relate to them? Are there plot contradictions and errors?

Beta readers differ from members of a critique group in that they measure the WIP as a whole whereas groups usually get a story in piecemeal fashion and focus in on a chapter at a time. Most critique groups also deal with line editing.

So once you round up your bevy of beta readers and send them your WIP, then what? Start by listening to their feedback. If your beta reader has a problem or issue, chances are others will, too. And most important is when numerous readers raise the same issues. That should be a red flag that there’s a major problem to address.

Other tips: Don’t be defensive. Sure, we all love our words—after all, they’re hard to come by. But comments from your beta readers are meant to be helpful and constructive. Don’t take offense. Take what they say to heart. Think about it for a while. Consider that they have a valid point and are not trying to tear down your writing.

Finally, always remember that it’s not personal. If it is, you chose the wrong beta reader. Regard the feedback as if you were giving input to a fellow writer.

How about the rest of you guys. Do you use beta readers? Are you a beta reader for someone else? Any additional qualifiers to choosing a beta reader?

Are rules made to be broken?

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By P.J. Parrish
Imagine you have just bought a novel. You haven’t read this author before but the cover was enticing, the back copy juicy. So you took a chance on a new writer. You are ready to be thrilled, chilled and transported to a place you’ve never been before.
Then you begin to read Chapter One. It’s written in the first person so the protag is identified only as “I.” I love first person novels because the reader-writer-protag bond is immediate and intense. Remember how Steve Hamilton opened his first novel A Cold Day in Paradise? – “There is a bullet in my chest less than a centimeter from my heart.” You gotta read more after that, right?
But what if you read page after page, chapter after chapter, and you never find out who “I” is? You never get the protag’s name. You don’t even get what gender “I” is. The only thing you finally learn about “I” is that “it” is a PI. And what if this goes on for the entire book?
It gets worse. What if you are never told where the story takes place? Or what year (or century!) it is. How long would you follow “I”? And how transported would you feel?
Okay, this is not a hypothetical. This is a real author. When I asked why this author chose to take this approach the author told me, “I did it on purpose. I didn’t want the reader to know his name or where it was taking place.”
Why? I asked.
The answer: “I’m trying to do something different because I want to stand out from the crowd. I didn’t want it to be the standard PI story.”
Well, this author had a point. It has always been hard to get noticed and get published traditionally. It’s even harder today. And it’s hard, even if you are self-pubbing via eBooks to get heard over the noise. And even if you do get published, it is hard to distinguish yourself in crime fiction as an original voice.
So where did this author go wrong?
This is just my opinion but I think it boils down to something very basic. This author tried to break the rules before he/she even understood them.
Quiz time. Who painted this:
Yeah, that’s a hard one. Here’s an easier one. Who painted this?

Anybody guess Picasso? Well, he painted both. The first was done when he was sixteen. The second when he was fifty-six. My point is, obviously, that even Picasso mastered all the basic elements of his art, got his craft under firm control, before he was able to find his unique innovative style. When he himself said, “It takes a long time to learn to be young” he was not taking about finding his joie de vivre. He was talking about absorbing the rules and then finding the courage to throw off their shackles.

All artists know this. The great choreographer George Balanchine created traditional story ballets in the style of “Swan Lake” before he developed the plotless style that revolutionized dance. Acting teacher Stella Adler famously said, “Craft makes talent possible.”

But let’s get back to our author. I so understand his/her impulse. We all want to believe we are different. But one of the points of fiction – maybe the main one – is to communicate and connect. And if you break that rule, you have broken the near sacred bond of fiction.
Yes, rules are made to be broken. And no, you should never ape someone else or slavishly cleave to the dictates of a genre. But until you know the rules of good craftsmanship, you will never be able to, in Picasso’s words “learn to be young.”
Can I leave you with one more thing on this subject? The following comes from Emma Coats, a Pixar storyboard artist. They are “rules” and I found them really inspiring and pretty darn useful for us bookish types. Read, digest and talk amongst yourself!
Pixar’s 22 Rules of Phenomenal Storytelling
1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
2. You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience NOT what’s fun to do as a writer.
3. Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about ’til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
4. Once upon a time there was______________. Every day____________. One day__________. Because of that__________________________ until finally _____________________________.
5. Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it actually sets you free.
6. What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
7. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
8. Finish your story and let go, even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what wouldn’t happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up. 
10. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you, you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
11. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, that perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
12. Discount the first thing that comes to mind and the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth. Get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
13. Give your characters opinions. Passive, malleable might seem likeable to you as a writer but its poison to the audience.
14. Why must you tell THIS story?  What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of. That’s the heart of it.
15. If you were your character in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
16. What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against them.
17. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on. It’ll come back around to be useful later. 
18. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it is cheating.
19. You have to know yourself. The difference between doing your best and forcing the story is testing not refining.
20. Here’s an exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How would you rearrange them into what you DO like.
21. You gotta identify with your character’s situations. You can’t just write cool. What would make YOU act that way? 
22. What’s the essence of your story, the most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

Oh No! It’s Typo!

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by Boyd Morrison

I’m nearing the July 1 release of my new book, THE LOCH NESS LEGACY, and the last step was to share the book with a few select beta readers so they could send me any typos they found. I didn’t think they’d find too many considering the book had already been copyedited and proofed by Little, Brown UK, which is publishing the book in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand (I’m self-publishing it in the US, except for Audible’s audiobook version).

My readers didn’t discover one or two typos as I had expected. They found over three dozen. To be fair, Little, Brown UK had already corrected some of them in their final version (I hadn’t transferred those corrections to my self-pubbed edition) . However, there were still a dozen that had escaped notice.

It’s infuriating, but a great lesson that I need to have others find the typos I’m blind to after reading the book over and over. And this isn’t a new problem for me, unfortunately. Check out the blog I wrote on my website four years ago, and then post a comment about your own exasperating typos.

——————————————

I hate typos. Despise them. They are vermin to be wiped from the face of the planet, ranking just below tapeworms and just above spammers trying to sell me herbal V1@gr@.

The irony is that, as I have discovered this past week, typos love me. They can’t get enough of me. Apparently, they get so distraught if they do not appear in my novels that they insert themselves without my knowledge just so they don’t feel left out of the fun.

After I posted my complete, polished novels to my web site and the Kindle, several alert readers notified me that they’d come across a few typos, which I’m grateful to know about so I can go back and fix them. That doesn’t mean I don’t need a moment to gather myself after finding out about them, because my reaction is usually something like this:

ARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!

I add in some very bad words if I want to be even more articulate.

The reason for my frustration is that I proofread my books very carefully to make sure they are as error-free as possible. I spend hours reading and rereading the novels until my eyes glaze over and I can’t see straight.  I don’t see how that method can fail.

And yet, it does. My most frequent typos are of the mixed-up variety. I type “their” instead of “there” or “your” instead of “you’re.” Of course, this kind of error can lead to some amusing outcomes. A few years ago, when some striking union workers felt they were being taken advantage of by management, they didn’t help their cause by carrying placards saying, “The managers think your stupid!”

But I can see how I might miss something like that. What I can’t understand is how I used a word like “valediction” in place of “valedictorian.” I’ve never used “valediction” in a sentence in my life. In fact, I had to look up what it meant (Val*e*dic*tion: a word Boyd never uses).

The worst typo I found, all by myself, was when I used “astronomist” instead of “astronomer.” Now, “astronomist” is not, technically, a word, so how both I and spellchecker missed it is a mystery, although some other people in the same situation might make wild accusations. For example, I would never start the rumor that Microsoft Word randomly inserts nonsense words into a person’s writing just for the enjoyment of programmers who get hilarious emails every time someone sends out a document with the word “squatful” inserted into it. That would be irresponsible.

Besides, I can’t depend on spellchecker because it’s not always reliable. It hasn’t happened lately, but it used to be that when I typed “Boyd Morrison” into Word, it would underline the words in red, diligently alerting me that I had misspelled my own name. When I asked spellchecker for a better suggestion, it came up with what should have been so obvious to me: “Body Moron.” Perhaps it was suggesting a new pen name for me.

I can take comfort in the fact that even NY Times bestselling authors have books with typos. My friend, James Rollins, whose books are epic action-adventure stories that I gobble down in about a day, wrote The Last Oracle, the cautionary tale of what happens if you stand too close to a molten nuclear reactor (hint: it involves the words “brain” and “tapioca”).

Toward the end of The Last Oracle, I found the sentence, “Her entire form shook as teats spilled in shining streaks of joy.” Jim, of course, meant “tears”, but when I tried to imagine the scene as written, I laughed so hard that the person sitting next to me on the airplane thought I had a medical condition.

When I wrote an email to Jim with praise for the book, I also told him of the typo. He emailed back just one sentence: “I read your kind words with teats in my eyes.”

So I suppose, like Jim, I should keep a sense of humor about typos and their affection for me. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like I could get saddled with some kind of ridiculous nickname just because of typos.

Sincerely,
Body Moron

A Key to Creating Conflict in Fiction

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Today’s post is brought to you by Conflict & Suspense, two things every novel needs. Yes, every, no matter the genre.

I’m not just talking about plot here, but characterization, too. It’s this latter aspect that some writers fail to take full advantage of. To illustrate, let me talk about one of my favorite movies of all time.
12 Angry Menis the 1957 film directed by Sidney Lumet, written by Reginald Rose (based on his play). The plot is disarmingly simple. Twelve jurors deliberate in a capital murder case. The entire drama, save for a short prologue, takes place inside the jury room.

At first, the verdict seems like a done deal. All the early chatter is about how guilty the defendant is (he’s a slum kid, accused of stabbing his father). One of the jurors (Jack Warden) has tickets to the ballgame and would love to get out early. Others don’t see the point in spending a great deal of time actually deliberating.
They take an initial vote. And only one juror, Number 8 (Henry Fonda), votes Not Guilty. Everybody else grumbles.
And for the next hour and a half, we sit in on the deliberations.
The movie violates all the currently fashionable, postmodern, ADHD stylistic conventions. No quick cuts or explosions or overbearing music. It’s all talk. It’s even in black and white, for crying out loud!
Yet, no matter where I happen to come in on the film when it’s on TV, if I start to watch I have to finish.
Why? Because inter-character conflict works its magic. What Rose did was bring together twelve distinct characters, each with their own background, baggage and personality, and throw them into what is essentially a great, big argument.
Therein lies the real untapped secret of creating conflict: orchestration. That means you cast your characters so they have the potential of conflict with every other character.
In 12 Angry Men, for example, there’s a Madison Avenue ad man (Robert Webber) who spouts bromides and tosses out suggestions, just like he would at a brainstorming meeting at the office. “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.” He’s amiable, easy with a laugh. But he never makes a final decision. He vacillates. Finally another juror (Lee J. Cobb) gets fed up. “The boy in the gray flannel suit here is bouncing back and forth like a ping pong ball!”
There’s a mousy bank clerk (John Fiedler) who automatically draws satirical comment from the macho salesman (Warden). There’s a coldly rational stockbroker (E. G. Marshall) who arrogantly dismisses all reasonable doubt, until backed into a corner by Fonda. There’s a young man who grew up in the slums (Jack Klugman) who, at one point, turns to E. G. Marshall and asks, “Pardon me, don’t you sweat?”
“No, I don’t,” Marshall says. There is nothing more to that exchange, but the line is memorable because of Rose’s superb orchestration, knowing the personalities and quirks of all his characters.
Then there’s the bigot (Ed Begley) who in one unforgettable moment alienates everyoneelse on the jury.
But it is, finally, the main conflict between Cobb and Fonda that is the focus of the drama. Cobb wants to get this kid executed (for reasons that become heartbreakingly clear at the end). Fonda wants to give the kid his due under the Constitution––the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
And that’s another lesson about conflict: the stakes. They have to be high. In fact, I hold that death must be on the line. Not just physical death, mind you. There is also professional and psychological death. Unless you have one of these overhanging, your story is not going to be as gripping as it should be.
In 12 Angry Men, physical death is on the line for the kid, but more importantly it’s a matter of psychological death for each of the jurors. After all, they could be sending an innocent man to the chair. In addition, each of them has some inner baggage to deal with. Like the old man ignored by his family (Joseph Sweeney), and the newly naturalized citizen trying to make it in America (George Voskovec).
Orchestration for conflict is essential in any genre, including comedy. Especiallycomedy. Think of, say, City Slickers.You have three friends from the city going on a cattle drive out west. They are very different from each other – one is a joker, one is macho, one is just a loser. Then they come in contact with someone who is unlike any of them – Curly, the ramrod. The comedy flows naturally out of the conflict between the different personalities.
So as you’re getting ready to write, you would do well to create a chart of all your important characters, a grid like the one produced below (taken from my article “Vitamin C For Your Thriller” in the July/August 2013 issue of Writer’s Digest):

Then figure out points of conflict between the characters, as in this example:
You will be pleased and amazed at all the natural plot tension, subtext and foreshadowing that will emerge from this simple exercise.

Trouble is your business, writer friend. Go make some.
What are some of your favorite ways to increase conflict, tension and suspense in your work?

Summertime, and the Reading Is Easy

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It’s time for another couple of questions for our readership. Summer starts today (as I am writing this) which traditionally (if not necessarily accurately) signals an upsurge in reading. I accordingly am curious as to what YOU are reading, right now (yeah, I know, you’re reading me. I mean when you’re done here). I of late (the past several months) have found that I can read more quickly if I juggle several different books at once: fifty pages or so at a gulp, and then on to another, and so on. I mention this because I am currently reading six books at once, which works out roughly to one for each of my personalities (none of us like to share). I review books for bookreporterdotcom; five those books are for review, and the sixth is one that I picked from my reading bucket list. Here’s what we’re reading this week:


SECOND HONEYMOON — James Patterson & Howard Roughan
THE SILENT WIFE — A.S.A. Harrison
EVIL AND THE MASK — Fuminori Nakamura; translated by Satoko Izumo
NORWEGIAN BY NIGHT — Derek B. Miller.
EYE FOR AN EYE — Ben Coes
and from the bucket list: MAIGRET’S RIVAL by Georges Simenon


Your turn. What are you reading now? And do you read one book at a time, or a couple, or several?

Reader Friday: A Collective Noun for Writers?

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It occurs to us that the world needs a collective noun that refers to a group of writers. (As in, “a murder of crows.”)

What would be your idea for a collective noun for writers? To get the idea ball rolling, check out a list they started over at Quill Cafe.

Cast your vote in the comments!

The Love Sandwich

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By Elaine Viets
          My condo looked like someone had a frat party in the living room. I’d barely said hello to my husband in a week. But I finished “Final Sail,” my Dead-End Job novel, on time.
          Newly married private eyes Helen Hawthorne and Phil Sagemont investigate two cases undercover. Helen works as a stewardess on a 143-foot yacht to find an emerald smuggler. Phil signs on as estate manager for a trophy wife, Blossom, after her  80-something husband, Arthur Zerling, died suddenly. Arthur’s daughter is sure her father was murdered.

          When I turned in “Final Sail,” I knew I’d written the perfect book. All I had to do was wait for the editorial letter to confirm it.
          In the novel business, the editorial letter is the in-depth evaluation of your work. You only get one if your editor cares about your work.
         Two weeks later, the letter arrived. “As usual you’ve written another fun, witty installment in the Dead-End Job series,” my editor wrote.
         Yep, I thought. I’m a pro.
         “Even though Helen and Phil have started their own agency, they’re still getting involved in plenty of dead-end jobs. Who would have known stewardesses go through so much on those yachts? Makes me want to cruise myself one day (but certainly not as ‘the help!’).

         “Of course, as one of your first readers, I do have a few thoughts/suggestions on revision.”
          Uh-oh. I had a sinking feeling.
          “As always, take what I say with a grain of salt,” she wrote. “If it doesn’t resonate with you, don’t feel compelled to use it.”
          That’s New Yorkese for “fix it.”

          I was hit with a boatload of improvements:
         Clarify the cause of rich old Arthur Zerling’s death.
         Find a better motive for the trophy wife, Blossom, to kill her young lover.
         Explain why Blossom killed her old husband in the first place.
         Could I also intermingle the two cases? Oh, and that couple on the yacht – the fat, cigar smoking gambler and his blond wife – tone them down and “redefine” their relationship.
         Wait! One more thing. Could I “strengthen the end of the book.” Switch the sections so it ends on a happy note? 

       “So now it’s just a little more revising,” my editor wrote.  “I think your readers are so going to enjoy this book!”
         She’s served me a love sandwich – two warm, tasty chunks of praise wrapped around really tough meat.
         I had two weeks to tear up my perfect book and revise it.
        I knew most editors don’t give novels in-depth criticism. I knew I was lucky mine cared.
 So how did I react?

          Like someone who’s just heard she has a fatal disease. You know Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief? I went through them all: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and  acceptance.
           First, denial. There’s nothing wrong with this book, I told myself. It’s good. No, great. My editor is ruining it. I won’t do it. So there.
           I wasted a whole day in denial, before I switched to anger. Now I was furious. What does my editor know? She lives in New York. She doesn’t even know any real people. She hasn’t been to Florida in years. I live here.
          Next came depression. I reread her note and realized how much work I was looking at.
          After two days of this war raging in my head, I reached acceptance.
          Maybe she’s right after all. Better to have her criticize my novel than let the reviewers rip it.
          I now had twelve days to rewrite “Final Sail.” The more I worked on the rewrite, the more I saw my editor was right.
 I finished the rewrite on deadline.

 And the New York Times reviewed it.
 “One way for a fugitive to hide in plain sight is to work at low-wage jobs,” Marilyn Stasio wrote, “which is what Helen Hawthorne has been doing in Elaine Viets’ quick-witted mysteries.”
 Thanks to my editor, I have this terrific Times quote for the jacket cover. That turned out to be a delicious love sandwich.

15 Tedious Tasks for Writers

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Nancy J. Cohen

Lately my mind has been a blank when it comes to writing blogs. It could be due to the influx of out of town visitors we have been hosting this month that makes it difficult to concentrate. Or it could be due to my WIP revisions on a book that’s over 104,000 words long. This might sap my mental energy. Regardless of the reason, it’s a good time for some mindless activity in between polishing the prose or escorting visitors around town. Here are some photos of the activities that have been leading me astray (not to mention gaining another pound).

I look a bit too relaxed there, don’t I?

Consider these tasks when you feel brain dead, too distracted or too tired to think straight. Here’s a list of jobs to do when you want to be productive without much mental effort.

• Organize your Internet Bookmarks/Favorites and verify that the links are still active.
• Verify that the links you recommend on your Website and your Blogroll are still valid.
• Update mailing lists and remove bounces and unsubscribes.
• Back up your files to the Cloud or to other media.
• Clean out and sort your files on the computer and in your office drawers.
• Convert old file formats to current ones.
• Delete unnecessary messages from your email Inbox.
• Eliminate duplicate photos stored on your computer.
• Delete old contacts from your address book.
• Unfollow people from Twitter who are no longer following you.
• Delete friends from Facebook who have deactivated their accounts.
• Sort your Twitter friends into Lists.
• Post reviews of books you’ve read to Goodreads, Amazon, Shelfari & Library Thing.
• Get caught up on a tax deduction list for your writing expenses.
• Index your blog posts by date and subject so you have a quick reference.

What else would you add?

Fun Tip of the Day: Google Authorship

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Have we talked about Google Authorship here before? I just enabled this neat little feature, which causes Google to display your picture and a profile box during searches on your name.

Here’s a screenshot of doing a search with my Google Authorship profile enabled. When I begin typing my name in Google’s search box, my picture appears along with the various search result options.

And here’s a picture of the search results. A box highlights my profile information, including a photo.

It’s hard to get everything on one screen to show you, but my Google Plus profile information also appears in a box with a photo. The example below shows Basil Sands’ picture instead of mine. Why, I’m not sure. Basil’s an IT guy, so maybe he can tell us, lol.

I just did a random sampling of searches on the TKZ bloggers’ names. The results indicate that most of us, but not all, have already set up a Google Authorship profile. Google Authorship is an incentive to get more familiar with Google Plus, which is much less popular as an outreach tool among authors compared to, say, Facebook.

So, have you been using Google Authorship as part of your Google Plus identity? Do you have any user tips or best practices you can share?

Write Who You Know (?)

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne

I’ve often been asked whether I have any characters in my novels based on real-life people It used to seem strange to me that many would-be writers seemed so concerned about real people suing them over characters in their novels. This is probably because I’ve never overtly based a character on anyone I actually know. Until now…

To be honest I’m still pretty nonchalant about the whole issue. It’s not like I’m incorporating anybody famous or likely to sue for defamation. From what I’ve heard from many writers, even when they did write a character based on someone they knew, that person didn’t recognize it was them anyway! All too often people who know you either erroneously assume they are one of your characters or fail to see the glaring resemblances to those who you do include:)

In my latest WIP I do have a character drawn from a person I actually know  (someone who basically would have made a good Nazi…) but I am creating a fictional composite nonetheless. Although there are some core (evil) traits which have caught my eye, I am conscious that I am writing a novel not a memoir and so the real life person really provides only a jumping off point for my character to develop. (Nonetheless I am looking forward to this character coming to a ‘sticky end’ in the book – call it a kind of karmic catharsis that cannot be achieved in real life!).

I think when including characters based on actual people, writers should probably be aware/think of the following:

  • Be mindful that you may run afoul of defamation laws if what you have done is so obvious that most readers would recognize the person and think less of them in real life (there are of course a myriad of laws/cases and exceptions and a discussion of the complexities of the law is beyond what this post requires:). Usually the person would have to be pretty well known and have a reputation that could be compromised by what you write (and I’m guessing that most people’s Aunt Maud or Cousin Loopy wouldn’t fit this bill).
  • Consider the consequences of including any characterization that is instantly recognizable as someone you know (be it friend, family member, colleague) carefully. You need to understand you could cause offence and/or alienate people as a result.
  • Understand too that many people close to you will assume (correctly or incorrectly) that they must be a character in your book and will scour the pages trying to identify who they might be. You should plan on how to respond  because 99.9% of the time they will be totally wrong. 
  • Other than that, recognize that everyone creates characters based on their own experiences, memories and the people they have known. It is therefore inevitable that some aspects of people’s lives or characters will pop up and inhabit a writer’s imaginary world.  

So have you ever consciously included a character in one of your books based on someone you know? Were they ever the victim or perpetrator? Did anyone ever recognize themselves as a character in your book and if so, were they right?