: Re: "Real people don't make good fictional characters". Really true? I came across such statement here on Writing SE and I don't agree much with it. But what I'd like to know is why would it

@Martha805

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There are two things that every fictional character needs to be likable: a clear motivation or goal and a distinct voice or personality that comes through their actions and dialogue.

Real people are vastly more complicated than this, of course. As a result, the difficulty with writing a story with a character based on a real person is that, in addition to (or sometimes instead of) focusing on giving the character a motivation and a voice, writers are tempted to add a third metric - how closely the character reflects their real-life inspiration. Unfortunately, in most cases, readers don't care about that aspect, and if a writer lets it take away from a character's motivation and voice, readers will be left with a less compelling character to read about.

If you can distill the inspiration you take from a real person into a clear motivation and clear voice for the character you write, you can make it work. An excellent example of this is the movie The Disaster Artist, which is about the creation of the cult classic and absolute bomb of a movie The Room. The main characters, Greg Sestero and Tommy Wiseau, are the two men who drove the production of The Room, so viewers of The Disaster Artist went into the film with expectations of how Greg and Tommy were going to be portrayed. The Disaster Artist does achieve fidelity to who Tommy and Greg actually are (or at least how their fans imagine them). For example, Tommy has, in real life, an impossible-to-place accent, leading to wild speculation about whether he is an immigrant and if so, where he is from. The Disaster Artist makes this aspect of him a running gag and important plot point. But the movie also captures a clear motivation for Greg and Tommy: to achieve their dreams of becoming actors and breaking into Hollywood. And it also captures clear voices for them: Greg is a naive kid in his twenties who gradually realizes how deep in over his head he is, and Tommy is wildly eccentric and wears his emotions on his sleeves. By creating clear motivations and voices for its main characters, The Disaster Artist successfully translated two very real people into fictional characters while still being largely accurate to who they really are.

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