Both I and a close acquaintance of mine are aspiring authors. She is not a Christian and her work is a dark mafia romance series where she has based several characters on wild caricatures of people she knows and their families. For instance, the character she has told me is based on me is a small-town pastor’s daughter who ends up married to one of the mafioso’s sons. The character, named Eden, later finds out that her father carried on a brief affair with her mother-in-law prior to marrying Eden’s mother.
While I understand what she’s attempting to do, there are also several other people based on her friends and some of their family members, exes, et cetera. Am I wrong in thinking that she is treading on a very slippery slope by doing this? She’s in the editing stages and we’ve debated back and forth for a long time about it– she’s very cavalier and doesn’t see anything wrong, while I see a potential legal landmine if anyone who didn’t give consent to become a character gets a hold of her work.
That’s a really good question, Erin. I’m no legal professional, so any of the advice here should not be taken as such, haha!
So long as she does not use their real names, and the plot points/backstories are not replicas of real events that have happened to the people the characters are based upon, she should be fine. I think she’d run into a problem if she used their real names, and accurate facts about each person, especially if the facts and people are shown in poor light.
Socially, I can see her running into a few problems if she tells these people who they are based after, especially if they don’t like what they read, haha!
But ultimately, it depends on how heavily these characters are based on real people.
Like Alli touched on (good answer, Alli!) there are two components: the legal ramifications and the social ramifications.
I too am no lawyer, but I can tell you that defamation is very difficult to prove. Someone would have to demonstrate reasonable cause that her words were based on them, not factual, and caused measurable damages. That’s tough.
There’s really nothing stopping you from writing true things about the people around you and using their real names. So writing fictional things with fictional names inspired by real people is all really fair game. In a way, aren’t we all doing that all the time?
Even if it’s subconscious, I assume that all of my characters are in some way aggregates of all of the real people I’ve met.
Socially, on the other hand, it seems like your friend is likely being unwise. Telling someone “I based this terrible character on you” certainly isn’t very nice. At the least, it’s a little insulting, at worst, it may cause other people to perceive your friend as unsafe. (What will she share next?)
So the answer is no, no one needs to give consent to be a character in your work. If it’s a work of fiction and you’re not using their name, there’s really no boundary. If it’s a true story and she’s presenting information that she reasonably believes it’s factual, she can even use their real names, no consent necessary. But it’s probably not wise or kind.
(Again, I am not a lawyer, this is based solely on my anecdotal knowledge working with other authors.)
Some of the events are loosely based on things that happened to real people, including to the author herself. She’s based characters on herself and people in her friend circle, living and deceased. There are at least 6 characters I can think of off the bat that are based on real living people. Three of these people (one of them being me) know they have been made into characters and have given some form of consent. Names and situations have of course been changed. But the other thing is that she openly admits having done this and has told at least 4 of the people who became characters that they are a character in her novel! Mercifully, three are all okay with it [I’m one of them].
Though not real, some of the situations presented are offensive (for example, a pastor in training [that I’ve been told by the author herself is based on my father] impregnates a prostitute only to leave her for his wife. The prostitute later terminates the pregnancy and when her son later brings home the pastor’s daughter and introduces her as his wife to both families, she throws the abortion in the pastor’s face, knowing he doesn’t remember her, and then tells her daughter in law that “[you] should have been mine.”