By Mary Jo:
Today I was going to blog on the question about how becoming published changes our feelings about writing. Susan Miranda has already done an excellent post on this topic, and I’ll get back to it another Friday, since it’s one of those areas that is different for everyone.
But I was distracted by a T-shirt that I spotted in one of the river of catalogs that flows into my mail box. The shirt says, “Careful or you’ll end up in my novel.” As the sales copy said, writers love this. <g> (There’s a sweat shirt version, too. http://tinyurl.com/yk2ang at signals.com)
After all, isn’t revenge on people who have tormented us one of the delights of being a writer? Now is the time to get even with the cool kids who snubbed us in high school! Or the office fascist who took obscene pleasure in oppressing the underlings. Or the ex-boyfriend who cheated or the one loved mind games. Don’t spill a drink on a writer at a party, or you’ll live to regret it!
At least, that’s the legend. What’s the truth?
As always, truth is variable. I do know writers who have been wronged and who gleefully put the causes of their pain into the next book, but given liability concerns, their victims are generally disguised. I know a case where a husband walked into a writer’s office when she was online and told her that he was leaving her. Since she’s a mystery writer, you can imagine what happened to him in her next book. <G>
Still, in my experience, real life villains rarely show up in novels without some 
changes along the way. Characters in books need to behave in ways that fit the story, which may mean that the transgressor gets altered to fit the action. Or several irritating people might be blended into one. What matters is that the writer knows who that fictional character really is under the cosmetic changes.
I suffer from a disability in the revenge area because I like just about everyone and I do malice very badly. Nonetheless, the world around me is the raw material of stories. While I’ve never put a real person into a story wholesale (barring 
historical figures like Wellington), I’ve used pieces of people, or perhaps some of their traits. A friend’s creatively painted fingernails showed up on one flamboyant Georgian character. Another friend said that after her wedding, her new husband paused on the way out to ring the church’s bell. I love that joyous image of pealing bells so much that it went into my one medieval.
Much more common is to transmute the essence of an experience into a story. The events and people may be superficially different, but the emotions come from real experiences. An ability to remember pain is actually very useful—pain can be transformed in ways that make one’s hapless characters seem authentic. (This is why it is generally considered a detriment if a writer has a happy childhood. <g>)
I’ve never been a Chinese Scottish woman living in Macao and forced to live as a male—but what person who has gone through adolescence can’t identify with feelings of alienation? Being an outsider is an emotion everyone feels sooner or later, and tapping into that emotion can lend power to a characterization. (The picture at the right shows a fox hiding out among the hounds. Talk about alienation!)
Does this mean that if you know writers, you run the risk of turning up in their novels? Probably not—it’s easier to invent characters. Yet even though I don’t put people from my life into my books, the cats are always based on real cats. Go figure.
Do you have people in your life you’d like to put in books? Or have put in books? Tell me about them! Discreetly, of course. <g>
Mary Jo