Michael said:

> Think of it in law enforcement terms.  Anything you see that takes
> place in a public place is public domain.  If you want to delve into
> more private aspects of a person's life then you need a warrant or
> any evidence you turn up will be thrown out of court as fruits of a
> poison tree.  It all depends, I suppose, on how ethical the
> individual writer is.

When I put something that has happened to me into my fiction, I try to
sieve it through a filter of three questions:

1. Was the event significantly life-altering that it warrants a
possible invasion of privacy?
2. Was the event significantly universalizable (applicable to more
than me) that it warrants et cetera?
3. Can due diligence be used in removing elements that would remove
identifying details or extra backstory that are unnecessary?

Point 3 works like this:

"In this particular novel, it does not add anything to the story that
the reader know the woman was seeing someone at the time? It is
sufficient to emphasize the age difference. Therefore, remove the fact
that the person was seeing someone else."

There's no use in keeping details that actually happened "just
because" they happened, if they don't add anything to the work at
hand. Such little details add some spice, but they also, because they
tend to be peculiar, can be particularly identifying. An actress
becomes a director. 28 becomes 27. Boyfriend disappears. And unless
God decides to go and tattle to the Inquirer about it -- the most
intimate identifying details were shared only by the two of us, and
so, nobody could clue in on those.

In the story about the 10 year-old boy who maims his friend, the only
person who ends up looking bad is the boy who launched the bullet
casing -- and that happens to be me, so I felt a certain degree of
freedom to stick with the facts. I can't imagine that the boy's
mother, all these years later, would be all to pleased to find out who
of the boys did this to her son (last I heard, he was still in need of
full-time care), but the whole sequence of events does not reflect
poorly on anyone but me. Well, it might reflect poorly on all the
boys, since a pact was taken by them to not reveal who did it. I
suspect, however, that the injured boy's brother eventually told his
mother who did the culprit was. (Backstory: it was a careless
accident.)

Perhaps one of the reasons this all sits on my mind so heavily is that
some of the (many of the) things I did as a youth are nothing to be
proud of. Accidentally maiming a boy who ended up mentally
incapacitated his whole life, seducing an older woman (or perhaps I
was the one seduced, I don't know) who was seeing someone else....
these things are ugly in the way that much of humanity and reality is
ugly, so my purely human side wants them to fade into oblivion, while
the sick, authorial exhibitionist part of me is forced to translate
them into fiction.

--
Quinn Tyler Jackson

--- Rachel's Little NET2FIDO Gate v 0.9.9.8 Alpha