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| Nikki Logan |
Mmm… Maybe not.
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| Image courtesy of Getty Images: Rich Lam |
It’s an interesting line you tread when using people’s real lives as inspiration. Quite apart from the moral issue of exploiting someone’s life for commercial gain, you just don’t know whether those people will go on to legally protect their stories. Like the honeymoon guy—someone snapped up the rights to that story immediately for a future movie, so anyone using the premise is going to find themselves in a bit of copyright trouble.
I get it. We’re writers. Observing people and making up wildly creative worlds around them is what we do as readily as breathing. It feels creative and exciting to take a non-fiction moment and let it fuel a fabulous fictional story. Of my twenty books, I don’t even need a whole hand to count those that don’t have real-world elements in them somewhere. I use those vignettes to empower a story but I’ve always tried to stay away from using someone else’s life too centrally. That’s their personal copyright after all. It just didn’t feel…right.
Until it did.
The premise of my new release, Her Knight in the Outback, was inspired by an awareness-raising campaign my sister started for an old flame of hers who had been an official missing person for two years. She started to share a lot of pictures of other Missing (because the network is super supportive of each other) and I realised how enormous this problem was.
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| Image courtesy of Dee Scully |
You’d think amid all that suffering would be the last place an enduring romance could flourish, right? I thought different. It was easy to imagine a strong, independent woman so emotionally spent from her hunt for her brother that she needs rescuing…just this once. Her own personal Galahad.
A leather-clad Galahad, in this case.
Sometimes, I’ve decided, real life inspires us for a reason. And I hope that, as well as being an optimistic love story, this book helps bring a little awareness to the global tragedy that is the Missing.
How about you? Do you think it's exploitative to use real life situations in stories?
I love to love: because if you don’t nurture it why would it stay?
I love to laugh: at my 6-y.o. nephew’s hilarious and brutally astute life observations
I love to learn: by buying obscene numbers of courses on just about everything from GreatCourses.com.
Her Knight in the Outback
A leather-clad Galahad, in this case.
Sometimes, I’ve decided, real life inspires us for a reason. And I hope that, as well as being an optimistic love story, this book helps bring a little awareness to the global tragedy that is the Missing.
How about you? Do you think it's exploitative to use real life situations in stories?
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| Her Knight in the Outback |
I love to laugh: at my 6-y.o. nephew’s hilarious and brutally astute life observations
I love to learn: by buying obscene numbers of courses on just about everything from GreatCourses.com.
Her Knight in the Outback
Falling for him was never part of her plan, yet having him there to catch her was a lifesaver.
For an excerpt of Her Knight in the Outback visit Nikki's website.
For an excerpt of Her Knight in the Outback visit Nikki's website.
I agree, Nikki. It is unethical to use the stories of other people for your own commercial gain. Of course, that doesn't mean it can't be done. Permissions can be obtained, but they will want a piece of the pie. And you are right--copyright can very easily be breached if you take someone's story and try to make money out of it. Good luck with your new release.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, Georgia. All of that is not to say that the 'essence' of a real-world story can't inspire you and can't appear in a work in the way any other muse-driven idea can, but it's dangerous territory to use someone's actual story as the basis of yours, I think.
DeleteHi Nikki. You've presented an interesting dilemma. Having given it some thought, I've decided I'm fine with taking an anecdote from a friend or something like a newspaper report and doing the old 'what if?' with it. I think creating situations and/or characters based on 'real life' makes a story more believable and creates empathy in our readers. But a blatant retelling of someone else's story? That'd be a No.
ReplyDeleteI like the sound of 'Her Knight in the Outback', and I hope it does bring awareness to the plight of Missing Persons. Such a tragedy for all the people left behind.
So true Marilyn Forsyth, MPs are a tragedy for those left behind. The AFP state that for every missing person's case (there are 35,000 reported every year in Australia) at least 12 other people are affected. That's at the minimum 420,000 people in Australia alone, affected by a missing person case.
DeleteThere's something like 20,000 young Australians reported missing every year. Take five minutes and go to the Crime Stoppers sight and scroll through the pictures at http://www.missingpersons.gov.au/missing-persons/profiles. You never know, you may be able to help put a family back together again.
Hi Marilyn - It's impossible for our creative minds to do their job unfed and everything we see, read or hear feeds us. And I completely agree with the creation of empathy if for no other reason than empathy affects us as writers and makes us passionate and passion/belief comes through loud and clear on the page.
DeleteDee - Thanks so much for having me on the Breathless blog. The good news about missing persons is that 90% are located reasonably quickly, especially the 'vulnerable' (those 20K minors, young women & those with disabilities) but that remaining 10% is full of 18+ men and women who are deemed adult enough to leave of their own accord. If someone has left without duress, the law can only do so much to recover them which means that a lot of people never, ever get any closure. My research really opened my eyes to the reasons that people go missing. Mental health issues were prevalent, of course, but some people just get overwhelmed by the pressures of their lives and opt to go off grid and start over (and in some cases they start over quite successfully). Others go into hiding to get out of a dangerous situation. Some just...go. But the common denominator in those who go missing of their own accord and stay missing is no contact at all with their past life. So for the families it is just pure torture.
Thanks for a great post Nikki. Plenty to think about. I know a lot of writers (Stephen King being one) who is always looking through the paper for ideas based on real life news articles but then he twists them in the way only King can do and makes them into something else. I've read many historicals where it is based on a real life couple from history but made different in the retelling by the changing of names and maybe even the continent it happened on. Do you think if the people in question are dead or historical that it somehow gives us a little more leeway to use their real life story or do you think there is still an element of exploitation still?
ReplyDeleteOoooo, good question Cassandra Samuels! I know you asked Nikki Logan for her response but I'm interested to hear what others think too... Personally, I don't see the difference whether someone is alive or dead. It's still their story and there are still ways to twist the reality into a better story--one that is the writer's own.
DeleteI really enjoy fictionalized historicals of real people, eg. the Philippa Gregory series that began with 'The White Queen'. I think those types of stories bring history to life. But if someone wrote a fictionalized story about a well-known person recently deceased, I'[d view that as exploitation. I think the difference is that history brings emotional distance; there's no one left alive to be affected by the story being told.
DeleteHi Cassandra - yes, totally. I probably should have added a line about that. I'm *counting* on it being okay to use elements of the lives of historical people in works for a historical side-series I'm working on. Of course, the kinds of people/stories that make it through history tend to be the famous ones and so that presents its own set of authorly challenges. But if you find an amazing nugget of little known history while researching and want to turn that into a fresh new story (or even take something better known and re-vision it), the most ethical and transparent way is just to acknowledge it in the foreword or afterword, IMHO. Like good old fashioned referencing.
DeleteI adore Philippa Gregory and I adore 'alternate' or twisted histories. One of my favourites is Tom Holland who was taking very famous real histories and twisting them with paranormal elements long before paranormal was a thing. Byron, Akhenaten and the pharoahs, Oscar Wilde, Stonehenge. He goes wherever the intrigue leads him. I was sitting here thinking about how recently deceased you had to be before I was okay with it and really what I kept coming back to was transparency. If you use someone's story (as inspiration or more than inspiration) you need to be upfront about it, I think.
DeleteUgh, now I need to go and see if there's any new Tom Hollands :)
Totally agree Nikki. I quite like having that extra bit at the back where the author explains where they got the inspiration and what historical sources she used. And if they changed history to suit the story they often say that too.
DeleteWow! You've really got us all thinking Nikki Logan!
ReplyDeleteI seem to agree with most of the comments here...that it's ok to take a kernel of real life and mould it into 'our own' storyline. I don't know that I'd ever really be tempted to use someone else's story in totality...I see too many 'what if' possibilities to make real life stories more involving. And then there is the old writer's adage...if I wrote about my real life, no one would believe me.
Hi Nikki. Your post is terrific, thank you. It certainly got me thinking. Writers are inquisitive by nature. They have to be in order to get their minds thinking up the stories they write. So being inquisitive about real life things is natural. Then, as Dee states, we play the 'what if' game and new twists and turns appear which actually changes the real-life event completely so your story bears hardly any resemblance to the real-life one.
ReplyDeleteI, too, like historicals about real-life people. I learn about the historical period that way. What I'm not too comfortable with is new stories about fictional characters written by a different author to the original one, e.g. all the Pride and Prejudice sequels.
Hi Enisa, I guess like everything it's in the execution. As an author, I agree it would be really difficult to do a good job of taking much-beloved characters (like Darcy and Lizzie) and rendering them in a way that is unique but at the same time familiar. Easier, I think to use historical figures that haven't already been captured so resoundingly on the page. Then again, do they inspire the authors to the same degree? Possibly not. I've read a few P&P mashups ("Pride/Prejudice", in particular, had *such* potential) and they never quite do it for me. But with something like Lost in Austen, I loved it because it just flirted around the skirts of the familiar world, characters and plot.
DeleteHi again Nikki. I just looked up the Great Courses site you mentioned. Wow! No wonder you love their courses! Fascinating range, and so comprehensive. I'll have to investigate them further. Thanks for the heads up about the site.
ReplyDeleteThere are sooooo many to choose from at http://www.thegreatcourses.com.au! How does one ever decide!
DeleteTo help decide, I wait for the sales. They put everything up for 70% or less once a year to keep it accessible for all. So I just wait for the sales emails and then go look. You can get them physically (CDs/DVDs) or you can download digitally. Either way you can watch/play in your own time.
DeleteI've done university level courses in a whole stack of things. Whatever interests me. The best so far was a crash course in history from the universe's creation called "Big History", a practical and good value course in Forensics, and a really interesting one on the Middle Ages.
I'm way behind on my viewing and still collecting them when they're on special.
Hi again Nikki. Thanks for this site. I'm really keen in exploring it.
DeleteHi again Nikki. Thanks for this site. I'm really keen in exploring it.
DeleteLOVED this post. Thanks, Nikki. It's such an interesting idea, nicking stories from real-life, and you're right, we all do it in one form or another. As is often said, everything's fair game when you're a writer. I try to be careful though. Like you, I fear pinching people's personal copyright and it just feels rude. So my stories tend to be amalgams of things I've picked up which are then twisted around until they're (hopefully) fresh and new.
ReplyDeleteI've also had the opposite, and made the discovery that life was imitating my art, so to speak. Some of the the things I'd written about started to happen. Talk about disconcerting!
Her Knight in the Outback sounds a cracking story and I really enjoyed hearing the inspiration behind it. Thanks.
Interesting Cathryn Hein! Care to share which of your stories (The French Prize maybe?) imitated life?
DeleteI'll be honest...I'm a Nikki Logan fan. Everything she writes is golden IMNSHO. I'm very much looking forward to Her Knight in the Outback.
DeleteHi Cathryn - amalgam is a good way of thinking of it. Little bits of lots of things woven into something new. It's like building a house from bits you find at a salvage yard. The resulting home would be unique and personal. But you'd never go into someone's house if it fell down in a cyclone and start helping yourself to their old doors and window frames. Maybe that should be the motto: Re-purpose, don't loot.
DeleteGreat thought provoking post Nikki
ReplyDeleteI don't believe a writer is a writer if they don't take in the world around them. I think it's what we do.
I do agree there is a fine line between exposing details or secrets of someone else's life or problems, but it doesn't mean we can't use that spark of insight that made us interested in a topic or issue in the first place.
As authors, we do have a responsibility to know what information to use, and where and when to use it.
There's so much media around us these days that we do not have to draw on any particular being and
Thanks for your post, Nikki. Have to say, I hope your book raises awareness of Missing Persons, and the plights they go through. And if one person is found from your link, it's all been worth it.
ReplyDeleteUsing people's real life vignettes in fiction has been done since time immemorial, I think. Obviously identifying someone and blazing it all around is not usually a happy situation, but a little story from their daily lives is writer fodder, I would imagine. And sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction...