Think You Can’t Get Sued For Putting Real People In Fiction? Think Again.

You can’t protect yourself as a creator just by changing names — but here are 5 tips that could help

Janice Harayda
Lit Life
Published in
5 min readNov 15, 2023

--

Still from “The Queen’s Gambit” on Netflix
Still from the award-winning Netflix series, “The Queen’s Gambit” / Netflix

Writing teachers and coaches flinch when they hear certain words. In my case, they include, “I’ll just change the names.”

--

--

Janice Harayda
Lit Life

Critic, novelist, award-winning journalist. Former book editor of the Plain Dealer and book columnist for Glamour. Words in NYT, WSJ, and other major media.