Real Life Versus a Good Story

For my first effort at writing in my new journal, I started with a prompt from the Writer's Digest that I also bought at Barnes & Noble on Friday. It suggests that you take a story from your real life and adjust it slightly to see where it takes you.

I took a story that I have been thinking about expanding on and started writing. Thirteen or 14 pages in -- front and back -- I'm thinking that I need to start typing it rather than writing it down, because I keep going and going. I do have a point in the story in mind where I want to stop and see if it's worth typing it up and writing more.

My other dilemma is when you're writing a short story or book or script, how much of a distance do you keep between your real life and make believe? I've changed some names to protect the innocent, but there's one name in particular that remains the same. He's not a person that I have any connection with anymore, but he was pretty important to me for a while and I couldn't think of a different name for him. At least, I didn't want to spend a lot of time for this exercise coming up with another name.

For some of the other names, it would still be pretty obvious to the real life people whose monikers I changed that I'm talking about them. And the facts of these characters remain pretty close to how they behaved when I knew them. Not that I expect at this point that the story I'm writing right now will ever be published, but you never know.

One or two people would be pretty embarrassed and maybe even angry if their written portraits ever made it into print. They certainly don't look like saints in the picture I've painted. Whether they recognize the behavior I've identified in them or not, they aren't likely to be happy about they way I viewed them or the way I'm portraying them.

So, how much should a writer keep the same and how much should they change when they're writing a story loosely based on their life? Are there any ethical guidelines that I should be aware of? Is it based solely on your tolerance for the anger you might cause? Or lawsuits you might generate if those people are easily identified by the reading public?

It's something to think about as I use images from my past life to create stories in the future. You always hear that you should write about what you know. What better place to start than your own real life dramas?