Writing About People You Know
Themes: Writing, Writing about people, facilitating abuse, privacy, comfort
I’m writing this October 2025 in a very reactive headspace. let’s see if that comes through after whatever light editing I end up doing.
(Author’s note. So,I was writing this during my breaks at work, and because of that, this ended up being incredibly well thought out. But, I do want to still state that this topic triggered me and I’m triggered talking about it, because it is just that bit we can do to not only resist the racist and misogynistic stereotype of “being emotional always means you have nothing of value to say ” a stereotype only used against some people. But also, I want to be clear and upfront about how that impacts my biases on the topic.
Another Bias of mine is that I am currently in a place where I deeply value personal history, community history, history as told by sources outside the imperial cultural center . And that requires an earnest description of those around you.
Let us begin:
I heard someone talking about a quote from an author criticizing people that write characters that closely reflect people they know, calling them “emotional gangsters” and emphasizing the need to black people’s privacy. And the person talking about it emphasized that the people write this for profit.
I have so many feelings.
Of note, I did not look up the original quote.
I fundamentally disagree with everything I’ve described and have a life experience that couldn’t feel any other way. And I simply do not find any value in the argument, and so I have less than no interest in looking into it any more.
So for our purposes, today, we will be centering this discussion around this interpretation of the idea and the context there.
And that leads us into an overhead reason why this bothers me.
For a lot of people, writing is a great way to express and process things around them and experiences they’ve had. And if you’re familiar with my writing, you understand the gravity of the situations this can apply to.
Thusly, I am particularly averse I am to the idea of restricting speech and expression for the sake of privacy because of how that consistently facilitates abuse. Abuse thrives when victims are only getting feedback about the situation from the person abusing them and convincing them that it’s normal. This applies both to someone expressing their distress and confusion from inside an abusive situation And to people who pick up a book and says “this is exactly like my life, now I have to process the fact that this is called abuse in the text and universally by the audience.”
I’ve written abusive parents very similar to my own because in order for me to write about,
express, and clearly display the trauma responses I’m trying to get across from the characters, I also show the aspects of the character’s environment that brought them about.
I’ll write about situations that have stuck with me, for better or for worse and doing an earnest job of portraying the person involved can help me understand my perspective and what exactly is causing an emotional reaction.
And from the audience side.
I have a whole video about bad book parents calling out abuse that wasn’t called out, and was often treated as something a child should be ashamed for not tolerating, in books. And I could very easily see the reasoning for that being the normalization of those acts.
I didn’t realize my parent was abusive until I saw a video of parents for and against corporal punishment talking to each other and only then did I realize, if it was supposed to be corporal punishment I was supposed to know what I did wrong. I wasn’t supposed to be scared whenever my mom was home. I wasn’t supposed to be walking on egg shells. And her telling me to kill myself was not a part of the parenting process. But I accepted that these were normal until I had access to something telling me it wasn’t.
So any argument that one’s privacy is more important than those experiences circle’s back to facilitating abuse.
And even, putting these things aside, I don’t find disassociating your writing from your reality to be some honorable thing. One phenomenally impactful part of craft is translating experience into narrative and a true depiction of someone is included in that.
Something that also makes this perspective feel deeply misguided is how at odds it is with so many aspects of writing that it becomes another scenario of someone creating a bullshit rule that places them in a place of superiority over others (similar to the person that says “a good book only has one exclamation mark). Then when challenged they just repeat “well, other than that, and other than that,” till you reveal how truly narrow their perspective was to start. But generalizations get better reactions.
Could you imagine telling someone, “don’t write that character to honor the teacher that believed in you because they deserve their privacy”?
Can you imagine telling a songwriter, “don’t write about the person you’re in love with because they deserve privacy?”
And if the privacy question is relevant anywhere, it’s in memoirs.
Could you imagine telling someone to write about their life and experiences without describing the people from their life because privacy?
(And I insist on these “positive” reflections, because if the line is drawn only at points where someone is perceived to have done something wrong, that circles back around to enabling abuse, which I will not entertain. Remember kids, comfort is a pillar of white supremacy. And if you’re going to waggle your fingers at things because you’re scared you’ll find out you caused harm in a way that makes You uncomfortable, you’re a guard dog for systemic abuse. But I digress)
I also find this whole idea to be ahistorical.
Folklore, and legend are that art of translating and processing experiences, and those around us. Classic writings follow the same path, so I simply don’t understand where this stems from aside from cultures that shame victims from speaking out to keep the peace etc, or that knee jerk reaction to protect comfort. But not out of a meaningful interpretation of the art.
All of this, for me, begs the question: why is isolating our craft from the people that made us us (good or bad) to be seen as valuable?
This feels as if chat GPT took the “artists shouldn’t use references” discourse, ran it through reddit and twitter a couple times then rewrote it about writing.
Though the context I came across this in doesn’t bring up difficulty. As someone who both creates new characters and writes one reflecting people I know, as a skill, I think the latter is more difficult. Because a long stretch of time informs your perspective of a person. And unless forming that perspective is key to the story, boiling all time down into exposition, something where in a chapter or two people start off feeling about this character how you’ve Grown to feel about the real person, can feel like asking the reader to pull context out of thin air while you condense three diminsions into one.
For ‘now, that is all on the first chunk of this issue.
Let’s zoom out to the context where I found this idea. Which does confuse me because the
person praising it had just written a book that talks explicitly about people in their life, which, if the question is privacy, then I stand by saying that’s more relevant when your saying “my real world cousin did this and that”.
I kind of think they excused it because their book is offered for free.
(An assumption I’m making because of how they emphasize the fact that these books are often
sold for profit and given how some of those relationships go in said book I’d believe it to be unlikely that they presented every person they mentioned with a copy of the book and got approval to share.)
Firstly, I do not think that the for profit element is relevant here as it has no impact
on the privacy question.
Secondly, I think emphasizing profit here erases how existing in a capitalistic society impacts
our relationship with art and puts the onus squarely on the individual to be acting within the politics you have regardless of their beliefs and experiences.
Because frankly
- If you grew up being told your art is only valid if people would pay for it cause that’s how
most of our society works, I wouldn’t blame You for believing that. - If you grew up being told that your work is only valid if it has an editor, and a Fancy
cover (things that have a cost). I understand why You might consider selling those books to help cover costs. - Writing , publishing, and marketing are a labor. If you believe that keeping up
- with that labor is only sustainable if you have income to cover your cost of living that doesn’t require another job’s worth of time and labor, I wouldn’t blame you for that.
- If the stories you have to write have these elements have these people, I don’t find it reasonable or anything other than oppressive barrier to the arts to tell people that they have to lock it away and write something else if they want to share something. Lord help us we do not need another voice filtering out what is “allowed” to be considered valid and valuable art.
And if here we’re talking about exploitation, I don’t find earning money for something you’ve written about someone else regardless of how much that factors into the work, exploitative itself.
This reminds me of a philosophy professor who wrote a paper describing it as manipulation to give someone an ultimatum. That to either you do this or I leave is manipulation. And the most prominent critique of the paper, both amongst seasoned scholars and my freshman self was earnestness. It is disingenuous to call it manipulation if it’s in earnest. (Given the connotation being used for the word manipulation in the context.)
To call it being an emotional gangster to write about people you know is an idea that feels like it’s incapable of reconciling with the idea that people aren’t just writing to make shiny thing that’ll get them attention and money.
People write in earnest, too.