More from today’s Guardian: Guy Gavriel Kay writes about the privacy threat inherent in using real people in your novels. He doesn’t go anywhere near the minefield of real-person slash, but he does make an eloquent argument for using fantasy as an alternative to claiming that your fictional character is an accurate portrayal of a real person.
2 thoughts on “Guy Kay on Writing Real People”
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I wasn’t convinced by this argument when Kay made it against using real countries, and I’m not convinced now. As Kay says, what he’s complaining about “needs to be sharply distinguished from Tolstoy.. or Dumas… or Shakespeare”, and making that distinction is pretty much what he fails to do.