A composite character can roughly be defined as a character in a piece of fiction, ie., a book, a movie, etc., who is based on two or more people from the real world. It’s a common literary device that writers use to populate their imaginary worlds with well-drawn individuals. So, what about when it comes to non-fictional writing, like journalism? It all seems pretty straightforward, right? Journalists shouldn’t make stuff up. Or pretend that someone exists when they don’t. But what if their intentions are noble?
Allow me to elaborate. A journalist interviewing activists during the general strike in Spain on the 11th of November (Huelga General 11N) might justifiably be tempted to create a composite character out of the interviewees in order to protect their identities from certain authority figures, for example. In this instance, who can definitively say what is and what is not ethically sound? Surely, something with such potentially far-reaching implications should be considered in quiet recollection?
As Creative Non-Fiction explains, there are times when “…composite figures make ethical and practical sense. If you are writing about the non-famous, particularly friends and family who did not ask to be in your story, they expect their confidences to remain confidential. Violating their trust might destroy your relationships with them. Yet you have a story to write, about what you observe and struggle with in the world and about the real people who struggle with you. What to do? Some avoid telling such stories as nonfiction. Others wait until the people involved have died. Still others publish somewhere that those involved won’t read… hopefully. Or they call it fiction and keep their fingers crossed.
Or they opt to write a composite character, particularly if several people exhibit similar traits.”
For many, however, composite characters violate the very essence of journalism. On this end of the spectrum, an anecdote about an ill-fated journalist named Michael Finkel can often be heard between breathy whispers about lush ledes, the five W’s, and headline word counts. In 2002, Finkel was fired from his job at The New York Times Magazine after it was revealed that the subject of an article he wrote on child slavery in West African cocoa plantations was a composite character.
Writer Kathryn Schulz adds: “The Times fired him and soon afterward published a lengthy correction, which took his transgressions from private to public and took a sledgehammer to his reputation.”
In 2023, however, the journalist’s novel, ‘The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession’, became an international bestseller, as well as a #1 New York Times Bestseller.
So, we’ve established that composite characters can potentially allow nonfiction writers to communicate information of public interest while protecting the anonymity of their sources and subjects.
They can also help them transmit the ‘feel’ of a place and the people that inhabit it without delving too deep into unsuspecting individuals’ personal lives (a tool that I imagine social historians find useful).
This is because composite characters have the potential to capture the zeitgeist of an era as they often embody a series of individuals that are representative of a specific time and place.
Additionally, journalists actively select what they consider to be the most important or relevant facts to include in their pieces, a process that is subjective in itself. While certain pieces of writing are undoubtedly more factual than others and come from more reliable sources, perhaps we should be sceptical of everything we read. This is because all forms of writing have certain limitations. Focusing on getting the 5 W’s down in the first paragraph, for example, can strip stories of their humanity, reducing complex individuals to mere ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’.
Despite this, however, it appears that the general consensus around the use of composite characters in the field of journalism is negative unless writers actively disclose the fact that the subjects of their pieces are based on real people from the get-go. The takeaway from all this? Don’t deceive your readers, or you might just end up writing an international bestseller.
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