Writers and their material

Are you talking about works of fiction or fact?

Novels. Dialogues, everyday situations. Stealing from your real life seems somewhat awkward.

There are all kinds of ways to steal from your real life.

I once wrote a short story with a protagonist who unlike me in most ways -- male, to start with -- but was basically autobiographical.

Sometimes, authors try so hard to disguise their source as to make the novels ridiculous. George Eliot was actually a nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans, who came from a family of devoutly religious evangelicals. She lost her religious fervor, personally, and it lead to a permanent break with her dearly beloved brother, who remained religiously fervent. So she wrote the novel The Mill on the Floss. Eliot is not in the highest rank of English authors based on the quality of her writing--her "greatness" comes from her ability to examine motive and behavior in her characters. It would be anachronism to describe her novels as psychological, but basically, that accounts for the continuing respect she gets as an author.

The Mill on the Floss is a truly awful novel. It is melodramatic to an embarrassing degree, and it is labored in describing the break between the protagonist and her brother. The final scenes, in which both the brother and sister are drowned in a flood, and are found dead in each other's arms, raises the melodrama very nearly to the level of hysteria. It is arguably one of the worst novels ever written by a capable author in the English language. She'd have done better to tell the simple truth in her novel, or simply never to have made the effort.

However, in Silas Marner, the religious fervor of the title character is a significant factor in his life, although evangelical dissenters are not a major part of the story. The story is somewhat melodramatic, though, and seeks to tell a moral lesson. Adam Bede directly concerns itself with a working class member of a dissenting, evangelical sect, and it is also melodramatic and moralistic. Neither novel was extremely melodramatic in terms of the Victorian age in which they were written, and the themes of evangelicalism and morality were then popular. Middlemarch is her best, and the melodramatic tone disappears altogether, with the moralizing being more general and less religious, although the main character is a fervent evangelical. Daniel Deronda[p/i] abandons the evangelic theme altogether, and makes what is in my opinion a failed attempt to objectively view Jews and their place in European societies--i found it eventually unreadable, and never finished it.

But my point is that religion, and especially evangelical religion, was the almost constant theme of Eliot's writing. This definitely results from her childhood association with fervent evangelicals, and yet only The Mill on the Floss attempts anything from an autobiographical source, and she fails badly by trying to so completely remove the story of the alienation with her brother as an autobiographical account. Her other novels are better, because she has the theme, and her knowledge of the subject, but she writes true works of fiction, not based on any necessarily personal experiences (except perhaps in minor details).

Several other examples come readily to mind, too, in examples where there is no autobiographical material. Larry McMurtry won a Pulitzer prize for Lonesome Dove, and his "historical" novels sell very well, and are held in high regard. However, he wrote a novel, Everything for Billy, which purports to be about Billy the Kid (Henry McCarty, alias Henry Antrim, alias William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid). Apart from being set on the same planet, and a really mangled account of a single incident which is known to have taken place in Billy's life, it is so far from historical reality as to be embarrassing to someone who is even passingly familiar with the life and times of Billy the Kid. It is also highly implausible, and its only redeeming characteristic is that McMurtry, even when his writing is bad, bad, bad, remains one of the best living story tellers in America.

History is prostituted to an alarming extent to provide authors with material with which they seem to think they can improve on the original.

If you offend someone in your novel, even very strong ties may be destroyed.

Do you know if changing names is enough to make real people unrecognizable in the eyes of the law? Even if they can be identified from circumstances.

I wouldn't think to comment on matters of the law. I'd think you'd need to be sufficiently obscure so as not to bring someone into disrepute--but i'm no lawyer, so that's just idle speculation.

I Googled "roman a clef" and as I suspected, a contributor to Wikipedia has done a lot of spadework.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_%C3%A0_clef

Legally the offended party would have to prove that s/he had been damaged by a transparent work of fiction.

Yes, an excellent starting point.
In Wikipedia, you shouldn't imagine that one person wrote the whole article. Someone writes the stub, then others gradually add their knowledge.