I know a lot of writers love to base characters on people that they hate, and kill them.  Even if it is only the writer that knows who the character is based on but it is something that I’ve never done, and I don’t think that I will.  I often put friends into my fiction and quite often they die in my fiction 😀 but that is done with a smile on my face and knowing that the person will get a kick out of knowing they’ve ‘Died’ in a story.  I have had a couple of friends ask to be ‘baddies’ in stories that I write.  In these cases I am very careful with what I do with these characters, one in particular comes to mind.  A very dear friend asked if she could be a baddie and the character that I gave my friend’s name to came alive and all but wrote her own story, which was very gritty.  It did not hold back and I put the character into a few different levels of hell and she did some pretty nasty things in the story, but I let my friend read it and she said she loved it so the character has stayed how she is and still has her name.

We need to be careful with this though as we can easily write something that will upset, offend of anger the person who has had a character named after them.  So as I said, I am very careful when doing this.  It is also easy to go over the top with putting our friends into our work.  I came close to this with my vampire series and have eased off a little with adding any more of my friends to it.  Generally when I do name characters after friends they are secondary characters that do not get much story time and rarely do I base the personalities on them, although the odd trait or maybe something about their look or style may make it onto the page.

I do enjoy putting my friends into my fiction, but it needs to be done carefully.