Turning Real People Into Characters Is an Act of Translation

It might seem like nonfiction writers get off easy when it comes to developing characters: We don’t have to create them from whole cloth, inventing layers of backstory and idiosyncrasy—the people we’re writing about already exist! But the work of translating a real person into a character on the page has its own messy, fraught challenges. There are the craft challenges of capturing the unknowable totality of a person (impossible) and the interpersonal challenges of facing people’s reactions to how you’ve described them (terrifying). Not to mention the exceedingly strange experience of turning yourself into a character, without the plausible deniability of autofiction.

Writing About the Self

In the early days of writing my memoir, Negative Space, I struggled to capture my teenage self. I had vague impressions of my past self as angry, feral, a snarling wraith of a girl. But what was under that hard shell? I could barely remember. I remembered that time from the perspective of someone who had lived through it and made it to the other side; I was busy looking forward, like most of us. But the memoirist has to stop and look back, to see her past self clearly, from the outside—as a character.

In developing the character of my past self, I asked all the usual questions that go into creating a character: What does this character want, and what is stopping her from getting it? What can she not see clearly about herself, about her circumstances? How does she change over the course of this story? I listened to her favorite music, walked the streets of her old stomping grounds. I drank her favorite whisky and read her journals and immersed myself in her way of moving through the world. I collected the little details, like the fact that she used the word “bizarre” a ton in her LiveJournal posts; she used too much gel in her hair; she never ever took off the necklace her father gave her before he died, not even when she slept.

And then one day, there she was: A skinny, angry girl glaring back at me from the page, cigarette between her lips. Yes, she had that hard edge I remembered, but I could also see now how excruciatingly young she was. How uncertain. And how deeply she was grieving—her father, her childhood, her sense of safety. Before I started writing memoir, I would roll my eyes when describing the teenager I used to be—the melodrama! But in thinking about that teenager as a character, I’d managed not to only make her feel real on the page, but to find compassion for her. To understand why she lashed out at everyone and everything the way she did. (This is the bait and switch of memoir: When you push yourself far enough out of the realm of catharsis and into craft and art, that is often where you find the most surprising, tender, emotional knots, massaging them into the shape of a story until you can feel them release in your body.)

I’d developed a character version of my past self that felt familiar and true. (So much so that the brief section of my memoir that was devoted to her no longer felt like enough—this character demanded a whole new book of her own, which became my essay collection, First Love). But she was still a simulacrum—she wasn’t exactly me. She was one version of me, carved out of the material of the specific story I was telling. But I could have written different versions of her for different stories, and they would have been true, too. And that’s the tricky thing about the act of translation that is writing about real people, including yourself: Even the best-written representation of a real person will never fully capture the depth and complexity of a living, breathing human in all of their contradictions and unknowability, changing from one moment to the next, existing as every version of themselves at once. Something is always flattened or lost, exaggerated or distorted, as we try to capture a real person and reproduce them in words.

Order a copy of First Love by Lilly Dancyger, available everywhere May 7, 2024.

Bookshop | Amazon

[WD uses affiliate links.]

But despite the impossibility of getting it exactly right, you still have to try to represent the character of your past self as accurately, honestly, and fairly as you possibly can—interrogating everything you think you know for sure about yourself and your experiences. Facing and articulating your own role in the conflicts in your life. Otherwise, what’s the point of writing a memoir at all? Readers can sniff out denial and obfuscation and are unlikely to trust a memoirist who describes her character-self as faultless, merely beset by misfortune. Compelling memoir requires merciless self-implication—also known as presenting the self as a well-rounded character, flaws and all.

Writing About Others

The stakes are even higher when it comes to the characters we create out of other real people in our lives.

Even the most supportive loved ones are likely to have a degree of trepidation about seeing themselves in the fun-house mirror of your depiction. Even if you write about them glowingly, if their role in your story is entirely positive and you write at length about how beautiful and brilliant they are, there’s still a chance that the specific details you choose to focus on, or even what you leave out, may chafe against their own self-image. And when the role a loved one plays in your story is more contentious, things can spin out quickly. But creating characters out of real people means accepting that they may not love everything you write. If your goal is to make sure nobody is mad at you after reading your book, you may not be ready to publish a book at all—especially not a memoir. (Though the more sensitive people in a writer’s life will find things to be offended by in fiction, too.)

Fear of negative reactions from loved ones is enough to keep many writers from writing a memoir at all. I’ve heard it so many times: “I won’t be able to write a memoir until my parents are dead.” But even death doesn’t release you from the pressures and challenges of writing about real people. I wrote a whole book about my father, who died when I was young; and more recently, in First Love, about my cousin, who was murdered, and a dear friend lost to suicide. In none of these cases did I feel like I had any less responsibility to portray these people fairly and truly than I would have if they were alive. In some ways, the pressure actually felt greater—they’re not here to refute anything I say about them. They can’t argue or disprove, or tell their own sides of the story. So, it was entirely on me to get it right.

In creating characters out of people in my life, I often return to my first impressions of them (or the earliest impressions I remember in the case of family)—to how they appeared to me before I built up a whole catalog of associations and judgments and intimate knowledge. I describe them as I first encountered them, fresh, as readers are first encountering them through me: Heather’s big sunglasses and calm, unbothered cool before the stories about her depression and death; Sydney’s short red hair and Doc Martens that I spotted across the high school auditorium before we ever spoke; even the impressions that were wrong, like Courtney’s bubbliness that I mistook for ditziness before I learned that it was merely the glinting surface of deep water. I let readers’ knowledge of these characters deepen through stories, getting to know them by following the same twisting paths of shared experience I once did—the moments of revelation and surprise, the first swells of intimacy. Even if I don’t end up keeping all of these details and revealing anecdotes in a chapter or essay (and I usually don’t), this practice, I hope, allows me to build a character that feels true to who the real person is to me. Because that’s what you’re really doing when you create a character out of a loved one as part of telling your own story: You’re depicting not the entirety of a person, but the version of them that exists in the context of the story you’re telling, in relation to you. Just like the teenage version of me that exists in my memoir is both true and incomplete.

It may sound like a disservice to the people you’re writing about to reduce them to the role they play in your story—and it’s true, a character will feel flat and false if there isn’t even a hint that there’s more to them than their role in your life. But go too far in the other direction and you risk an even greater insult: telling parts of their story that aren’t yours to share, presuming to speak for them.

Transmuting real people into characters that are compelling, multidimensional, and as true as possible requires a delicate balance, avoiding both extremes: You accept that, at best, you can only hope to capture who your mother or brother or friend is to you, knowing that who they are to you is far from the totality of them. And at the same time, you try to stretch beyond the narrow constraints of your subjective perspective, to see them from a distance. To see them, essentially, how you want a reader to see them: as a whole, complicated person with strengths and flaws and quirks and an entire interior life that’s not accessible from the vantage point of the story you’re telling.

[Memoir as Detective Novel by Lilly Dancyger]

Conjuring teenage versions of my friends for the essays in First Love required as much immersion in the past as conjuring my own past self. I looked at tons of photographs, trying to step back into the moments they captured brief flashes of. I reread the copious notes some friends wrote to me, scribbled on lined paper (I saved them all, an instinct for archival preservation before I knew what possible use I might someday have for them). And when possible, I asked the people I was writing about to help me step back into the past, filling in gaps by reminiscing. I told them what I was writing about and asked how they remembered that summer, that trip, that conversation, bringing bits of their recollections into my own storytelling to add depth and texture. But even when I included their perspectives, I was still telling my story, not theirs. Staying firmly rooted in my own subjectivity even as I gestured toward the separate, overlapping subjectivity of other characters.

This is where the constraints of nonfiction make themselves known: When developing a fictional character, and even to some extent when developing the character version of your past self, you can assign desires and motivations that make sense in the context of the story. You can approximate, develop an interiority that feels true. Other people’s desires, motivations, and interiorities, however, are never truly knowable to us—even when we ask them directly what they wanted, how they felt. We see only the versions of other people that they show us, and we filter our perceptions of those small slivers of their humanity through our own biases and desires and needs. Other forms of nonfiction may strive for an objective perch, but memoir in particular is defined by its subjectivity. Acknowledging this in our depictions of other people is not a disservice—on the contrary, it shows respect for the fact that each person we’re writing about is so much more than the character we’re creating. Because of course they are, inevitably.

There’s no way around it: No matter who you’re writing about—yourself, loved ones living or dead, people who have harmed you—there comes a point in the process of writing and publishing memoir where every author is left to contend with the distance between the characters they’ve created and the real people they represent. All you can hope for is that when you reach that point, you can stand by your characters because you’ve built them with compassion and respect for the people in your story, and, as with so much of memoir, a simultaneous commitment to truth and acknowledgment of its slippery subjectivity.

Register for the next session of the Writer’s Digest University course, Memoir 101.