Can you write from real life without being a creep?

Honestly, if you’re an author, you’re probably always going to be something of a creep. You can’t help noticing things about other people that set them apart, whether or not they want you to. You secretly don’t really care whether they’re morally good or evil, you can use the material either way. You just need them to be interesting.

As a child, I would go home after school and write down all the most interesting conversations I’d had, word for word. I wanted to remember the funny jokes we’d said, because I could read them and feel exactly the same as I had the first time. Emotions were a drug I could call up at will, if I could only write down what made me feel them the first time. Needless to say, my rewatch factor on television is off the charts. I can recite episode transcripts.

Skip several years to my twenties, when I was trying really hard to get a short story published. I’d had my very first non-fiction essay published, but my fiction wasn’t going anywhere. I’d sent out seven pieces on submission, with months of waiting and endless rejections. Then, I had a really bad breakup, and in the span of a weekend, wrote a piece about the breakup. They say you need to bleed onto the page. There was gore. I was hurt and furious and living in the middle of a Greek tragedy. I sent the piece for publication. 

It was accepted a week later. And that was when I realized I’d used my ex’s real name. 

I frantically wrote back to the magazine and begged to change the name. They were confused, but agreed. The piece still made it obvious to anyone who knew both of us who I was talking about, but at least there was some anonymity. For them. I was stupid enough to publish it under my real name.

Then came the Cat Person saga. A writer in an MFA program wrote about a sexual experience that another woman had, and the story went viral. The essay in Slate is fascinating, watching two women with significant voices and influence wonder about the unexpected power their words have wielded when they spoke about real life.

Every story I write is based on real people. No story can soar unless the characters ring so true that you can hear their voice in your head, so naturally the best characters you write will be based on the people you know really well or see everyday. But basing characters on real people is not the same thing as using our stories to silence, bury or change them. And that’s what I hope never to do.

I say hope, because our minds are complex things, and pettiness and resentment have a way of hiding in the inscrutable gray matter of our skulls. And even a flattering or realistic portrayal can make people unhappy; not everyone is ready to be so fully seen. 

My current approach is to go back to what made that first (deliberately not shared here) fiction story so successful: the person I eviscerated on the page was me. I held nothing back emotionally, even if the circumstances of the story were entirely fictional. There was little fact in the story, but a whole lot of truth. My truth. And that is what I try to discover in my stories now.

Above: me, people-watching at the Dead Sea.