Mistake Number 7

Don't Use Real People in Your Story. Fair enough. Real people are boring: “Good characters have to be constructed, not copied from actuality.” Here Bickham is telling us that the characters we build need to be larger than life in order to be vivid on the page. And "Good fiction characters also tend to be more understandable than real-life people. They do the things they do for motives that make more sense than real-life motives often do." The reader doesn't have to agree with those motives, but they have to be clear. "To put this point another way, in real life people often don't make sense. But in fiction, they do."

#7 Don't Use Real People in Your Story