Today I welcome author GP Gottlieb who shares about how to hide the real identity of the characters in our stories.

Let’s say you went to school with a girl whose resting expression was cranky and who thought herself superior to everyone else. If you feel compelled to turn that irritating show-off into a character in one of your books, my advice is to disguise her so that she’ll never know. You won’t even need to use a pen name.

I’ve written a list of tips that you can use to make sure nobody thinks any of your characters are based, for example, on Ellen Kopelstein, the disrespectful, two-faced, back-stabbing mean girl who told everyone that you had cooties. And silly me, because after she alienated everyone in high school, including the cafeteria ladies, she glommed onto the only person in the school willing to talk to her. I was a sucker to believe that she really wanted to be friends. You can imagine how that turned out, and nobody should be surprised about how influential she’s been in my writing.

Although there’s no need to dwell on the past, I have a few suggestions for how to turn an unpleasant and unsympathetic person into a character in a book:

1.    Turn your version of Ellen Kopelstein, who was stingy, and still has the pearl earrings she “borrowed” to wear to her cousin’s wedding, into a sweet but dorky boy with a name like Allan Koppelstein, who never borrows anything from anyone, and always gives money to homeless and other unfortunate people.

2.    If your version of Ellen Kopelstein had a loud booming voice and an annoying habit of touching your arm while she talked, turn Alvin Kappelstein into someone who speaks in hushed tones and is respectful of everyone’s personal space.

3.    Convert the story of how Ellen Kopelstein spilled her drink on you and told everyone in the cafeteria that you peed in your pants into a story about how Dylan Kipplestein did CPR and gave his jacket to a woman who’d been attacked in the park, thereby saving her life.  

4.    If Ellen Kopelstein told her mother, who told your mother about the 25-year-old drummer you were dating when you were 17, causing you to lose your car and weekend privileges, then make Helen Cooperstein the kind of person who joins the CIA and keeps a secret even after being forced to sleep on a concrete floor and eat crusts of bread for three days.  

5.    If Ellen Kopelstein is still lying about everything that happened to the chemistry lab, make Adam Cablestein a guy who’s so honest that the United States government trusts him to negotiate a hostage exchange with Russia.

6.    If Ellen Kopelstein went after the one boy you liked in high school and did things with him that you weren’t ready to do at age sixteen, then have your character, Ellie Kopelberg, be secretly in love with you because you were the only person who sat next to her at lunch and even shared potato chips.

7.    If one of your characters takes modern dance classes, no matter what gender they are, Ellen Kopelstein is going to tell everyone that it’s based on her because that’s her métier (she pronounces it with a French accent). Just change it to ballet or jazz dance and let her twist an ankle or turn the character into a refugee named Elena Castro who is a sultry singer of Cuban ballads.

The important thing is to never give any indication that you are writing about someone who exists in real life. Doing that would be as terrible as plagiarizing, your publisher would drop you, and people would stop buying your books. I also suggest that you avoid writing about how Ellen Kopelstein is a bitter, angry, surgically enhanced middle-aged woman. Also don’t mention that her husband is having an affair with an old frenemy who is now a published author.

Hope my tips are helpful! Happy writing, everyone -

About GP:  

G.P. Gottlieb is the author of Charred: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery (D.X. Varos Publishing 2023), the third in her culinary mystery series. She has interviewed over 175 authors as host for New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. You can read more about her at https://www.gpgottlieb.com/.