According to a recent article in The New Yorker, in 2002, a journalist named Michael 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.”

The general consensus around the use of composite characters in the field of journalism seems to be negative unless writers actively disclose the fact that the subjects of their pieces are based on real people from the get-go.

Composite characters allow nonfiction writers to communicate information of public interest while protecting the anonymity of their sources and subjects. They also allow them to transmit the ‘feel’ of a place and the people that inhabit it without delving too deep into an unsuspecting individual’s personal life, 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 select what they consider to be the most important or relevant facts to include in their pieces, an activity that is relatively subjective in itself. While certain pieces of writing are undoubtedly more factual than others and come from more reliable sources, I think we should be sceptical of everything we read, to a degree. 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 victims or perpetrators in the eyes of the reader.

However, I think it can be hard to draw a line between whether a composite character has been used to embellish a piece of writing or has been created due to valid privacy concerns and some writers might take advantage of this. What’s more, nonfiction writers have a wealth of modern tools and techniques available to them that potentially render the creation of composite characters redundant at times. To avoid deceiving readers and losing their trust, it is probably best to have some solid reasoning behind the creation of a composite character and to disclose the fact that you’ve used one sooner rather than later.