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            I locked my bedroom door. Not that I had to worry about anybody coming in. Lukey played Monopoly with his friends in his room. They never ever finished a game, but they sure tried. Mark studied like a monk at the dining table. He always studied after dinner. He had to get good grades. If he didn’t get straight A’s, he got depressed. It’s hard to believe that a twelve-year-old could be depressed, but Mark had to be perfect. His half of the room was in complete order. He wrote a daily record of everything he did. If he missed a day, it was like the end of the world or something. And he had his ceremony. About every other week, to keep from getting depressed, he’d start his whole life over.

            First he’d slip into the hall closet. It was the biggest.  He’d close the door. Dad and I stood outside the door one time to hear what he did. From inside the closet we heard:        
            “Starting...right...now.” We heard him take a deep breath, blow it out, and then he burst out of the dark closet—a new person. He’d clean his half of the room, organize his drawers, his side of the closet, line up his shoes by color, clean the kitchen—top to bottom—wipe everything down, pick up junk around the house, bring his journal up to date, swab the toilet with cleanser, clean out the tub and sink, scrubbing all the black scum from between the tiles with an old toothbrush, take a scalding hot bath, wash his hair—twice—mop up the water from the floor, brush his teeth, comb his hair, dab on some Hai Karate cologne, put on clean clothes and do his homework. Did I mention he was only twelve? How could anybody get like that in only twelve years?

            But it made Mark happy. For a few days. Then he’d do it all over again. We got used to it.
 
            That's a passage from my novel, Worlds Apart, where I describe with some hyperbole what my real brother Jon used to do.  I took something incredibly interesting to me about my brother and let the character in my book adopt it as his own.  In fact, the characters of Mark and Lukey in my book are loosely based on two of my real brothers, Jon and Timm.   My characters aren't clones of my real brothers--fact is definitely stranger than fiction--but there are elements of their personalities, attitudes and behavior that I adopted for my characters.
            In the book, I embellished or downplayed true family stories, fictionalizing them.  But I often wonder how my family read into it, though.  There are aspects of my book that made my mother sad and possibly embarrassed.  It wasn't my intention to cause her any pain or regret.  But when I wrote certain passages based on fact, I had to ask myself: How far do I go?  I'm not writing an autobiography, but there are incidents and things done and said and believed from my life that I want to put into my stories.  It's writing what I know.  And I know my life.
            Or do I?  Being a fallible human being, I have to realize that I have a selective memory.  And the older I get, the more selective it seems to become.  In fact, the older I get, the less memory I have to select from.  
            Here's the dilemma I had: friends and associates who know my family might read the book and recognize things about the character in my real relative.  Once there's recognition, everything about that character could be involuntarily embellished.  This happened to me once when I read something written by my friend Todd.  I knew he'd based his character on his wife, because I recognized something in his character that was exactly like her.  After that, everything I read came to me from that perspective.  Even things that were totally fictional.  I couldn't help it.
            In Worlds Apart, John Banning, the father of my main character, is an Evangelical pastor and a missionary to Haiti.  Well, so was my real father.  And then I wrote a totally fictional scene about him flirting with a woman who owns an ice cream store in Port-au-Prince.  But ended up taming the details I originally put in.  Originally, I wrote the character as having more blatant flirtations, bordering on infidelity.  But I backed off on that when I realized that some readers will know my father and figure that not only did I use him as the basis for my character John Banning, but they might believe that my dad fooled around in Haiti when he was supposed to be doing missionary work.   And a wonderful thing happened.  In my re-write, I ended up with a scene that had a mysterious subtlety to it.  Rather than hitting the reader over the head with infidelity, I tickled their fancy with flirtation...and simultaneously kept my father's reputation in tact--not that he deserved it--but he lives across the street from me and, at 79, he can still kick my ass.
            So when I adopted my family for fiction, I was careful not to write something that could be construed as a bad character trait, unless it really was true.  And that's how I answered my own question about how far I would go.  I decided I would go so far as to tell the truth.  But I did not use derogatory fictional characteristics that someone who recognized the real person on which I based the character could believe was based in fact.  That would be harmful to my family.
            I didn't back off, though, from using truthful traits about my real family--derogatory or otherwise.  Hey, it was a good way to test their "unconditional" love for me.  If after they read how I saw them, I figured they gotta still love me. Right?  I mean, we're still family, right?  
            So there.  Onward.