Well tonight’s post is more of a question to all writers out there.
I have two genres that tend to excite me into a writing frenzy, comedy and psychological, sometimes supernatural horror.
Like many other writers Dean Koontz and Stephen King to name two of my literary heroes, I tend to write from what I know.
Things / people / situations I have experienced within my life either in the world of fiction or in “the real world” often become my initial inspiration.
Once the inspiration is set a huge element of emotive fiction is added to move a story forward or to clearly define a character I am trying to portray.
The initial inspiration is merely the seed, the starting point and once that seed begins to take form it grows into something else, a completely new living breathing entity.
Now the question….
How do other writers respond when close friends or family notice and object to similarities between fictional characters and situations you have created and themselves?
Maybe you have a character killed off, or you have taken a characteristic from someone you know and made them into a murderer or one of a million other possibilities.
I would be intrigued to hear your views and opinions on this.
Speak soon x
I’m not sure friends or family notice when you take your inspiration from them. People often notice the good stuff but ignore the, shall we say, more challenging stuff. Generally people tend to think of themselves as ‘nice’ or ‘good’ so if you write something based on them and it isn’t ‘nice’ or ‘good’ they just won’t see it as themselves. Then again, in my writing I always change names and I tend to only take parts of someone’s character as inspiration then mix it up with all sorts of other stuff. That way it’s heavily disguised and I can engage in a spot of plausible deniability should anybody take offence!