: 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

@Phylliss352

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Yes, real people make for bad fictional characters. And yes, they make for a good basis for fictional characters. This distinction, I think, is the heart of this matter.

If you try to use a real person as a character in a fictional story they will generally feel out of place and disconnected. This is because the real person is not actually part of the story you are trying to tell. They are part of entirely separate context that is not relevant to the story. This makes them feel flat and boring.

If you want to use a friend or family member as a character it is better to create a fictional character with a place in the story and give them some recognizable traits of the person you are trying to place.

The issues come from the author thinking of the character as the real person, so as long as the character is clearly not the real person in the authors mind it does not matter how similar the real and fictional are. So there is no real reason to use the real person as is.

This is a limitation of how the human mind handles "people". If you think of the fictional character as the real person, it will limit how your mind handles the character based on the limits of the real person, automatically and invisibly.

You can compensate for this but the end result will look just as if you had created a fictional character based on a few key traits of the real person. Except you wasted lots of time and effort doing it. Probably won't be as fun and appealing either since you spent your effort on fixing things instead of creating.

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