Last year, we received a manuscript that was, by any editorial standard, excellent. The writing was sharp, the research was thorough, and the story at its center was genuinely compelling. A family’s decades-long involvement in a small-town political scandal, told through interviews, court records, and the author’s own reporting. We wanted to publish it.

Then a question came up that stopped us cold: one of the central figures in the story, a woman who had been tangentially involved in the scandal, was still alive, in her eighties, living quietly in the same town. She had not been contacted for the book. She had not been given a chance to respond to the claims made about her. The author argued that the public record spoke for itself and that contacting her would have “contaminated” the narrative.

We didn’t publish the book. Not because the facts were wrong, but because the process was wrong. And that distinction, between factual accuracy and ethical practice, is at the heart of what I want to talk about here.

The Basic Problem

Non-fiction writing about real people carries a responsibility that fiction doesn’t. When you write a novel, your characters exist only on the page. They can’t be hurt by how you portray them because they don’t exist. When you write non-fiction, you’re dealing with actual human beings who have families, reputations, inner lives, and the capacity to suffer. The words you publish about them will follow them around, potentially forever, in an age where everything is searchable.

This sounds obvious, and yet I’m regularly surprised by how casually some writers treat the people they write about. I’ve read manuscripts where living subjects are described in terms so harsh and one-dimensional that you’d think the author had never considered that these are real people with feelings. I’ve seen memoirs where family members are flayed open for the reader’s entertainment without any apparent consideration of what it might be like to see yourself portrayed that way in a bookstore.

The ethical questions around writing about real people don’t have clean answers. That’s what makes them hard, and why they deserve more careful thought than they usually get.

Truth, Accuracy, and the Space Between

The first distinction I want to draw is between truth and accuracy. A piece of non-fiction can be perfectly accurate, every fact checked, every date correct, every quote verified, and still be untrue in a meaningful sense. How? By omission, by emphasis, by the frame the writer places around the facts.

Imagine a profile of a public figure that includes only their worst moments, their ugliest quotes, their most questionable decisions. Every individual fact might be correct. But the portrait that emerges from those facts would be a distortion, because it would exclude everything that complicates and humanizes the picture. Context isn’t decoration. It’s part of the truth.

Writers make choices about emphasis constantly, and those choices have ethical weight. Which details do you include? Which do you leave out? What goes in the first paragraph versus the last? What gets a full scene and what gets a single sentence? These are editorial decisions, but they’re also moral ones, because they determine how a real person will be understood by thousands or millions of strangers.

I think about this a lot in relation to Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield, which deals with historical figures in a context where the available records are incomplete. When the historical record has gaps, the writer has to make interpretive choices. Responsible writers acknowledge those gaps. Irresponsible ones fill them with speculation presented as fact.

The Right of Reply

Journalism has a well-established norm: if you’re going to write something critical about someone, you contact them for comment first. You give them a chance to respond, to correct errors, to offer their side of the story. This isn’t just good practice. It’s considered a basic ethical requirement by every reputable news organization.

Book-length non-fiction exists in a strange gray area around this norm. Some non-fiction authors adhere to journalistic standards rigorously. Others argue that books are different from articles, that the format and the timeline and the expectations are different. I’ve heard writers say that contacting subjects would compromise their independence, or that the subjects had already had plenty of opportunities to speak publicly.

I’m sympathetic to some of these arguments in specific cases. But as a general principle, I believe that if you’re going to publish something that could damage a living person’s reputation, you should make a genuine effort to contact them. Not a pro forma email sent to an address you know is defunct. A real, good-faith attempt to hear their perspective.

This doesn’t mean you have to include their response or let them dictate the narrative. It means you have to ask. It means you have to reckon with their humanity, even if you ultimately conclude that the story you’re telling is accurate and necessary despite their objections.

The manuscript I mentioned at the beginning failed this test. Not because the author was malicious, but because they convinced themselves that the public record was sufficient. Maybe it was. But the woman in her eighties, reading about herself in a published book for the first time without ever having been contacted, would not experience it as a fair or humane process. That matters.

Memoir: The Hardest Case

Memoir occupies the most ethically complex territory in non-fiction. When you write about your own life, you inevitably write about other people’s lives too. Your parents, your partners, your children, your friends. These people didn’t choose to be characters in your book. They didn’t sign up for public exposure. And yet, if you’re writing honestly about your experience, you often can’t tell your story without telling parts of theirs.

I’ve worked with memoirists who agonize over this, and I respect them for it. One author I edited spent months going back and forth about how to portray her mother, who had struggled with addiction. She wanted to be truthful about how her mother’s addiction affected her childhood. She also didn’t want to reduce her mother to a case study or a villain. The final manuscript achieved both, but it required enormous care, multiple revisions, and some genuinely painful conversations between the author and her mother.

Not all memoirists are this careful. There’s a strain of memoir writing, popular and commercially successful, that treats personal relationships as content to be mined for narrative material. The messier the family, the more dramatic the betrayals, the better the book sells. I find this troubling. The people being written about are usually the writer’s family members, people who often can’t effectively push back against a published narrative without creating even more public drama.

My editorial position on memoir is this: you have every right to tell your story. Your experience is yours. But you have a responsibility to be fair to the other people in your story, to represent them with complexity rather than as convenient characters, and to consider seriously whether what you’re gaining by including certain details outweighs the potential harm to people you care about (or once cared about).

Some memoirists change names and identifying details to protect the privacy of people in their lives. This is a reasonable compromise in many cases. Others share the manuscript with the people portrayed and invite feedback. This can be fraught, because people sometimes object to entirely accurate portrayals of themselves, but the act of offering shows respect.

Public Figures Versus Private Citizens

There’s an important distinction between writing about public figures and writing about private citizens. Public figures, politicians, celebrities, corporate leaders, have voluntarily entered public life and have reduced expectations of privacy regarding their public roles. Writing critically about a senator’s voting record or a CEO’s business decisions is fair game and socially valuable.

Private citizens are different. Someone who happens to be involved in an event of public interest, a witness, a victim, an ordinary person caught up in extraordinary circumstances, didn’t ask for scrutiny. Writing about them requires more caution, more sensitivity, and a higher bar for what justifies including personal details.

Even with public figures, though, there are limits. The fact that someone is famous doesn’t mean every aspect of their life is fair game. Their relationships with their children, their medical history, their private grief, these are areas where even public figures retain a legitimate claim to privacy, unless those private matters have direct bearing on matters of public concern.

I’ve turned down book proposals that wanted to dig into the private lives of public figures in ways that felt prurient rather than illuminating. “The public has a right to know” is a phrase that gets used to justify a lot of writing that’s really more about satisfying curiosity than serving the public interest. The question I ask is: does the reader need this information to understand the subject and their public role, or are we just gossiping between hard covers?

The Composite Character Problem

One technique that raises recurring ethical questions is the composite character, combining traits from multiple real people into a single figure to protect identities or simplify a narrative. Some writers use this openly, noting in their author’s notes that certain characters are composites. Others do it quietly, without disclosure.

I’m not categorically opposed to composites, but I think they require transparency. If you’re presenting something as non-fiction, the reader has a right to know when characters have been amalgamated. Undisclosed composites are a form of deception, even when the underlying facts are accurate. The reader is being led to believe they’re reading about a specific individual when they’re actually reading about a construct.

The same applies to reconstructed dialogue. Non-fiction frequently includes quoted conversations, but let’s be honest: nobody remembers the exact words of a conversation from twenty years ago. The best practice is to note, either in the text or in an author’s note, that dialogue has been reconstructed from memory and may not be verbatim. This is a small disclosure, but it matters for maintaining trust with the reader.

When the Truth Hurts

Sometimes the ethical thing to do is to publish something even though it will cause pain. Investigative journalism exists precisely because some truths need to be told regardless of whether the subjects want them told. Exposing corruption, documenting abuse, holding powerful institutions accountable: these are functions that justify discomfort and even harm to the people being written about.

But this justification depends on the public interest being served. “It makes a good story” is not sufficient justification for causing harm. “It will sell books” is even less sufficient. The question has to be: is there a public benefit that outweighs the private harm? And who is being harmed, the powerful or the vulnerable?

Writing that punches up, that holds the powerful accountable, has a stronger ethical justification than writing that punches down, that exposes the vulnerabilities of people who lack the power to defend themselves. This isn’t a hard rule (there are situations where writing about vulnerable people’s experiences serves the public interest), but it’s a useful orientation.

I think of this in the context of books like The Last Archive by Catherine Voss, which grapples with questions about institutional memory and accountability. The best non-fiction about institutions manages to be rigorous about systemic failures without being gratuitously cruel to individuals caught within those systems. That balance is hard to strike, but it’s what separates responsible truth-telling from score-settling.

Our Editorial Process

At ScrollWorks, we’ve developed a set of practices for non-fiction manuscripts that involve real people. These aren’t formal rules carved in stone. They’re guidelines that reflect our values and that we revisit regularly as new situations arise.

We ask authors whether they’ve contacted the living subjects of their books and, if not, why not. We discuss this early in the editorial process, not as an afterthought.

We flag passages where the portrayal of a real person feels one-dimensional, unfair, or gratuitously negative. This isn’t about softening the truth. It’s about ensuring that the portrayal is as complete and honest as possible.

We require transparency about composite characters, reconstructed dialogue, and any other techniques that blur the line between fact and interpretation. If it’s in the book, it needs to be disclosed.

We consult with a legal reviewer for manuscripts that make potentially defamatory claims. This is partly about protecting ourselves legally, but it’s also about protecting the integrity of the work. A legal review often catches problems that are as much ethical as legal.

We have conversations with authors about the potential consequences of publication for the people in their books. Not to talk authors out of writing honestly, but to make sure they’ve thought through the implications. Sometimes an author decides to modify a detail or add context after these conversations. Sometimes they don’t. But the conversation itself is valuable.

The Reader’s Responsibility

I want to briefly address the reader’s role in all this, because the responsibility doesn’t rest solely with writers and publishers.

Readers of non-fiction should be skeptical. Not cynical, not dismissive, but appropriately questioning. When you read a book about a real person, you’re reading one account, filtered through one writer’s perspective, shaped by one publisher’s editorial process. It’s a version, not the version.

This means being cautious about forming strong opinions about real people based on a single book. It means paying attention to the author’s sources and methods. It means noticing when a narrative seems too neat, when every detail supports the author’s thesis and nothing complicates it. Real life is messy. If a non-fiction book makes a person’s story seem simple, something has probably been left out.

It also means being aware of your own appetite for certain kinds of stories. The market for non-fiction that exposes, that reveals, that strips away privacy, exists because readers buy those books. If we, as a reading public, consistently reward writers who are reckless with other people’s lives, we’re complicit in the harm that results.

No Clean Answers

I started this essay by saying these questions don’t have clean answers, and I want to end by reaffirming that. Every manuscript, every situation, every real person written about presents unique considerations that resist one-size-fits-all rules.

What I do believe is that the conversation matters. Writers who think carefully about the ethics of writing about real people produce better, more honest, more trustworthy work than writers who don’t. Publishers who take these questions seriously publish books that readers can trust. And readers who approach non-fiction with appropriate skepticism and compassion create a market that rewards responsibility over recklessness.

The woman in her eighties, the one in the manuscript we didn’t publish? I sometimes think about her. I think about what it would have been like for her to walk into a bookstore, or to have a grandchild text her a link, and find herself the subject of a book she didn’t know existed. I think about how that would feel. And I think our decision to pass on that manuscript, even though it was well-written and would probably have sold decently, was the right one.

There are books that the world needs, books that tell hard truths about real people because those truths serve the public good. We want to publish those books. But there’s a difference between necessary truth-telling and careless exposure. The difference lies in process, in intention, in the willingness to treat the people you write about as human beings rather than material. That’s the standard we try to hold ourselves to, and it’s the standard we encourage every non-fiction writer to consider.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.