an ethical question

[boxofdelights]

Suppose you read a newspaper article about an unjust oppressive thing happening to a kid. Suppose that later, you became possessed by a desire to write fiction about kids figuring out how to protest against injustice and oppression. You thought you'd start with something like that incident you'd read about, but you were mostly interested in how the kids might respond to it: what might they do, to try to change things? What effect could they have? What would people do to try to stop them? Who would help them? How would they feel about the unintended consequences of their actions? And so on.

Eventually you noticed that you had neglected to come up with a different inciting incident. In fact, a lot of what you had come up with was pretty firmly rooted in the details of the actual thing that happened to some actual child. Because the actual thing was pretty much perfect, for your story. You didn't want to give up any part of it.

Would it be enough to change the name, age, sex, and nationality of the kid the incident happened to? Or would you still feel like you were stealing someone else's story?

Comments

[ljgeoff]

I think it would depend on the incident. If the incident were such that it would be easy to guess who you're writing about, even if everything was changed, then it'd still be problematic.

Stealing someone else's story? That's pretty much what writers do. If we only wrote about things that only happened to ourselves, most books wouldn't be written.

[boxofdelights]

Yes. I really don't want to write RPF about a kid, or anyone who isn't a public figure.

I've been thinking about "Good writers borrow, great writers steal," and I think it means that if you're a great writer, you can make the story your own.

I'm not great. Yet.

[jesse_the_k]

You probably know all this already -- but just in case. I come at this from my experience as an interpreter charged with maintaining complete confidentiality.


What counts as "identifying information" depends on your kid's culture/community. Parental connections are super-strong signifiers in many cultures; uncle/aunts are more important in others. The smaller the community, the more readily any tidbit serves as a unique identifier.

So switching community membership could make a big difference.

Because you have an ethical concern, I think this is a situation where a beta reader would be very helpful.

[sasha_feather]

Doesn't publishing something in a newspaper make it public information? It seems like it's not confidential anymore; ie this wasn't something told to you in confidence. It's a story that is rooted in reality, and imagines the consequences of a reality-based event, which sounds fine to me.

But agree that a beta reader is probably a good idea!

[silveradept]

If you can change it so that people go "huh, that seems similar to the thing. Maybe it was inspired by it," you've probably done things well enough for anonymity.