Inspiration or Exploitation?

with guest blogger Nikki Logan

Nikki Logan

Remember the Canadian guy who recently advertised for someone with the same name as the woman who’d just left him at the altar to use his fiancée’s airline ticket and go with him on their non-refundable honeymoon? Or the insanely romantic photo of the man and woman kissing on the asphalt with London riot police in the background? Either one fabulous fodder for a fictional romance, right?

Mmm… Maybe not.

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.

Image courtesy of Dee Scully

I dug further, I read professional reports and ordinary people’s experiences, I started to see the similarities in their otherwise dissimilar stories. So, the characters in Her Knight in the Outback are a kind of amalgam of the diverse personality types I saw in my research. The ones who give up their whole lives to the hunt for their particular Missing; the ones who moved straight to acceptance as a coping strategy; the ones who were entirely ready to forgive all if only their loved one would return alive; and the ones who lay crippled under their resentment and anger that someone they loved would intentionally cause them such pain.

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?

Her Knight in the Outback

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

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.