: Re: Where's the line between coincidental similarity between a character and a person, vs. being uniquely identifiable? I'm trying to understand the verdict in Red Hat Club case. Vicki Stewart sued

In the "Red Hat Club," it seems to me that the author was drawing on a SINGLE woman for the inspiration of her main character, rather than a generic "type."

One of the tests I use is, are there 100, or better yet, 1000 people who could be the inspiration for the fictitious character? Or is she described so exactly that there could only be one person (or a handful of people) in the world who fit the description? I wonder if there are as many as 100 women in the whole United States that broadly fit the background description of "Susu." If only 3-5 five of them come from Georgia, that narrows things down even further, perhaps too much.

In writing my own fiction, the first thing I do is to change the names, ages, and often the gender of any "real life" children involved. That's an easy "fix," one that the author didn't use. Instead, the name of her heroine's daughter, Mignon, was a barely-disguised version of the real life "Mindum." And giving the fictitious heroine the same marital history, down to some pretty excruciating details, didn't help either. During the trial, the court noted some 30-odd similarities between Susu and Vicki Stewart, with quite a few of these similarities being "unique," rather than "generic," e.g., female, poor, rural, works with her hands, comes from the U.S. South, etc.

In this case, the issue doesn't seem to be "Could Susu possibly be Vicki Stewart?" but more like, "how could she be anyone but Vicki Stewart?" If the latter is the case, the author hasn't taken sufficient care to disguise the character.

I'm not a lawyer, so I'm answering as a writer, and more to the point, a potential juror, i.e. "finder of fact."

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: Re: Where's the line between coincidental similarity between a character and a person, vs. being uniquely identifiable? I'm trying to understand the verdict in Red Hat Club case. Vicki Stewart sued

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: Children's Dialogue I'm having some trouble writing dialogue (and emotive responses) for children in the age bracket of roughly 10-13. They end up reading more like adults with limited vocabularies

: In so doing your narrator is suddenly thrust into a more personal relationship with the character, akin to the character with whom he is speaking. That is not necessarily bad, but it shifts

: Adding to @Philipp 's answer: Know your plot and the consequences: If you describe the scene from POV of the victim, who provoked the action, you need a reason why she provoked it. If

: How does one determine how much of a song you can use without paying? In the movie, "The Perez Family," there was a scene that featured the band playing something like two lines of the song

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