How to Write Compelling Family in Fiction (Without Alienating Your Actual Family)

I wasn’t thinking much about fiction in my early years as a journalist. Reading it, yes, but not focusing on writing it then. Yet one of the key things I’ve learned about telling family stories came to me from someone else’s newspaper column.

(4 Uplifting Novels About Family Drama.)

In it, the writer chronicled a day of personal parent-child turmoil over a common rite-of-passage event: The shopping trip to get an adolescent girl a first-ever bra. Because this columnist was a regular and thus known by the local public, the youngster in the story could easily be identified by everyone who knew her or her family.

I read this column in appalled outrage. It was easy to imagine how that teen would have felt entering school that morning: Not just mercilessly exposed, but betrayed by the very person whose job it should have been to shield that youngster from public exposure. In that moment, I swore I would never let a story—no matter how good, no matter how I itched to tell it—seduce me into humiliating my living family members that way. And I haven’t, I hope. So far.

The problem in fiction is that we writers naturally draw on both our own experiences and those of other people we know for inspiration and the kinds of details that help create verisimilitude. So how do we reconcile the need to protect our sources with the need to write about them?

Well, there’s the noble way, the fraught way, and the practical way.

The noble way is, simply, not to write novels about anyone close to us. Period. This is a very steep, narrow mountain trail with few footprints on the path and no beer cans, candy wrappers, or other signs of fun left behind.

The fraught way is, I expect, for the many writers whose intense drive to write their personal stories dovetails nicely with their not feeling very warmly toward their relatives. Thomas Wolfe was one of these. He changed only the names in what amounted to autobiography about his North Carolina hometown and college, skewered a bunch of people who never forgot it, and still became one of the most famous literary artists of the 20^th century. So it seems to have worked for him. On the other hand, he couldn’t go home again.

In fairness, I feel obliged to point out that a hybrid of the noble and the fraught does exist. It’s for those whose need to tell has not overmastered their need for an ancestral homestead to visit for the holidays. It takes real courage and ethics, though, so be aware that this option, like choosing to be the one who gets out of bed first to deal with the dog throwing up, is not for everyone. 

Example: An author-friend of mine wrote a novel clearly based on her family, especially on her troubled relationship with a parent, but she took pains to talk with the parent first, explain what and why she was writing, and actually get her parent’s okay before the book was released. She wins the True Grit award.

The practical way offers most of us a welcome out. It has the relieving qualities of not requiring exile, guilt, or self-repression, and the route is delightfully varied. It’s the approach I took with my debut novel, The Changing of Keys, a September 2024 release from Regal House Publishing, and I think it worked. So far.

In part, this is due to luck, if you can call it that. The story I wanted to write arose from my lifelong puzzlement over my father, to whom some bad things had happened as a child and who couldn’t seem to overcome the effects of that despite growing up to be a highly intelligent man, a doctor likely considered successful by most people who knew him. The “luck”? My father was no longer alive when I started writing it.

Basing our characters on family who have passed automatically makes authors’ work easier in terms of avoiding hurt feelings and/or libel suits. But as many of us can’t do this, a parallel road is available: Use that living family member as a model of whatever characteristic or situation drives the story, but camouflage it with details quite unlike the person’s real life.

Innumerable writers have done this and I am another. I made the character based on my father resemble him much more in temperament and behavior than in life circumstances. It seemed to me both a natural and a deliberate choice. After all, whether we’re conscious of it or not, we writers of fictional families probably can’t help turning them into echoes of our own kin, because those are the people who taught us what we know of kinship. But to me, what works even better than exact copying is taking the essence of that family or individual relative and adding outside, but equally believable, characteristics to it.

I think fiction writers instinctively create such composites because characters based entirely on real-life people don’t quite do the storytelling job. Blending in other qualities and episodes from other sources helps us make our fictional person an enhanced, richer version of the model we have in mind, one who will intensify the message and the impact we want to deliver.

For instance, my father grew up in the Midwest, but because he was an emotionally isolated man in some ways, I situated my character on a literal island outside the United States in hopes of conveying succinctly, maybe even subliminally, to readers something significant about my character’s nature. Changing settings also helps mask my father’s identity. I did something similar with his personality and actions. So even though it was my father and his choices that impelled me to write the novel, that character ended up encompassing lots of other behaviors and attitudes I’ve seen and heard.

Altering a reality-based character’s situation and traits can do that inverse work of both disguising and revealing character. But writing fictional family is not just about individuals—it’s even more about relationships and context. This is where I think being a journalist helped me, though I suspect anybody can do this well with practice: I had spent years observing and listening to people in interviews and in action and so developed an ear and eye for how they sounded, moved, and interacted.

We need such skills to be able to create for readers a sense of how our characters are with each other, because humans act differently with their families than with other people. We have to recognize the special ways family members speak to each other, how they touch each other, what jokes they share, what expressions they use over and over, what buttons they know to push. And then we have to figure out how all these things create the undercurrents that affect the family’s personality as a whole. For that task, knowing your characters as if they were blood relations is an undeniable advantage.

But if you value your place at the dinner table, just make sure they aren’t truly recognizable to anyone but yourself. 

Check out Carolyn Jack's The Changing of Keys here:

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