When you model a character in your book on a real person, sometimes you run into problems, particularly when the character stops behaving like the person.

Last week I shared my completed book with my best friend, Roy, and his wife Linda. Roy has been my friend and business partner for almost twenty years. We’ve had some amazing adventures together, and through good times and bad, he’s always treated me right.  So it was natural that when I started writing this book, I modeled the character of Marty’s partner on Roy.

Both the character and the real man grew up on a ranch in Eastern Oregon. Both are athletic, enterprising, and confident. There’s a story in the book about a spectacular race car crash – Roy really was driving the car when that happened. Where there’s a description of that character in the book, it describes Roy.

One of the strengths of my book, I’ve been told, is the dialogue. I think that’s because I’ve been able to channel the kind of bantering that Roy and I do every day onto the pages of this book. It sounds authentic because it is authentic. And when I veer off target with that dialogue, I only have to picture the real Roy saying those lines to know they are wrong.

I had even called this character Roy in the book.  I’d given him a different last name, Roy Rhodes, but it was a lot like his real name, and that was where the problem arose. Roy didn’t mind it – in fact, he liked it.  It’s kind of fun to live vicariously through a character in a book.

But after reading the book, his wife, Linda, took me to task in the nicest possible way.  She pointed out that the character in my novel was making some very dubious ethical choices that the real Roy would never make. For example, there’s an important scene where the partners meet with a potential investor and then are interrupted by the Russian killer. As a result, they wind up providing the investor with false information. Linda didn’t want Roy’s friends or his business associates to think he would ever do something like that.

Well, I thought, you never know what you’ll do when you have a gun to your head. But, I also had to admit, I’d made many of the characters in the book darker and less morally upright than they were in real life. It’s like a painter, who picks a woman from the street as his model for the Madonna – he makes her look holier than she is. I was also working from real life, but going in the opposite direction.

Why? Well, it makes for a better story that way. This is fiction, and it’s way more fun when characters get themselves into trouble through their own bad choices. I don’t want any Dudley Do-Rights in my books – in fact, I wanted the freedom to make the character based on Roy make some really bad decisions.

So, I decided to change the character’s name. It was a simple but profound change. I wanted something uncommon, that was very masculine, that had a bit of a country ring to it, and ideally, was alliterative. We bounced around a bunch of ideas over the next couple of days, and then my wife came up with a name that we think is just perfect, Bo Bishop.

The Bo came from Bo Schembechler, the legendary University of Michigan football coach. She liked Bishop because it gives Bo an aura of sanctimony that may or may not be justified by his actions over time.  My apologies in advance to anyone whose real name is Bo Bishop. The character was certainly not named or modeled after you.

And my apologies also to the many real-life people who inspired some portion of the other characters in my book. There are no portraits as true to life as Roy’s, but there are snippets here and there, greatly distorted to fit the needs of fiction. As I don’t actually know any Russian killers, I’m not too worried about that one coming back to haunt me.

Michael