Things Left Unsaid

Let's get one thing clear: the YA Contemporary manuscript I'm shopping right now is NOT a memoir.

But...

The basic narrative events draw heavily on personal experience. Which means that, almost inevitably, people will "recognize" themselves in certain characters (some with more reason than others), since they, as people, stood in a similar position to events as various characters do to the events in the story.

Which begs the question: how much you owe the real people in your life if you choose to write?

If the best friend in my story is influenced by one of my own high school friendships, do I have to give character-her a totally unique appearance? Different traits? Different speech patterns? Or is it better to make her an obvious riff off the real person, since character-her is being drawn through a totally different series of events than real-life-her ever was?

Would you be more flattered to find a version of you in fiction, or more offended?

And if a character in a story who you previously thought looked like you does something you don't like the looks of, is that me (the author) being unfair, or just honest? Or is it totally irrelevant, since this isn't you, it's just someone with a few of your tics and the same hair color, like approximately 27 million other people worldwide?

To some degree, it's all moot: I can't help drawing on people I know for my characters, if for no other reason than people I know are the only fleshed-out models I have of how-people-are.

Of course my mom influences how I think of moms--I only ever had the one. My sisters are going to seep into sisters in stories, because they're the only way I've ever experienced that specific incredibly-close-and-often-still-annoyed-with-one-another relationship.

Maybe it will make people feel better to hear that basically every character I write, ever, has some element of me in him or her (sometimes most of the elements of me). I'm always the first and last primary source I choose to plagiarize.

But that sounds, to me, like self-justification. I want to know, from other writers and from non-writers, how you deal with this (from both sides, as a potentially-violated original or as a thief of all your relationships and experiences).

Would you be okay with seeing bits and pieces--or even whole swathes--of you in someone else's story? Or would you be pissed off, since chances are that, if you keep popping up in someone else's fictional worlds, eventually you won't show to advantage?

And beyond that, should it matter? Should I worry whether people like what they see in my stories when what they see is themselves? Or should I just hide behind the flimsy-looking veil of "it's fiction?"