For a while now, I’ve been watching classic documentaries, working my way through various best-of lists. They’ve taught me a lot that’s useful for writing, especially about portraying real people. The other night, I was watching Chronicle of a Summer, a 1961 film by French sociologist Edgar Morin and filmmaker Jean Rouch, which was supposedly the origin of cinéma vérité. In Chronicle, the filmmakers travel around Paris and St. Tropez interviewing their friends and acquaintances about what their lives are like and whether or not they’re happy. Near the end, they show an early cut of the movie to the people featured in it, and then they film their responses. One of the characters, a worker at a Renault factory, says something I’ve been thinking about ever since. “I found the film extremely painful,” he says. “When it’s not terribly boring, it’s at the cost of total indecency.”

I’ve written a lot about real people. Both of my books are about another person. I’ve also published a lot of essays and short stories that had people I knew in them. Before I became a creative writer, I was a journalist for a while, so I interviewed and wrote about all kinds of people, from college kids to politicians to Olympic medalists. I’ve written about normal people, famous people, litigious people, people of various identities, dead and living people, the people closest to me, and people I’ve never met. I’ve also been teaching for twenty years and have watched a lot of other writers struggle with writing about people in their work.

I’ve seen some of the most important relationships in my life affected by things I wrote. For one example, I’ve spent the last decade trying to repair my relationship with my dad because of how I portrayed him in my first book. I’ve also seen my fellow writers, friends, and former students have to deal with significant real-world consequences because of what they wrote about people in their lives.

The longer I do this, the less I believe that there are any rules for writing about other people, or that my experiences would be instructive to anyone else. So instead of discussing them, I thought I’d talk a little bit about the questions we tend to ask when this topic comes up.

One category of questions I often hear are what I call “consequence questions.” Sometimes these are legal questions, the only response to which is “don’t ask writers for legal advice.” More often, people worry about interpersonal or relationship consequences. They want to know how the people in their lives will react. But of course, nobody else can answer that. We don’t know the people you’re writing about. And even if we did, people react in all sorts of unpredictable ways. Some of the people I wrote about have been angry. Some were hurt, some were proud, some didn’t care. Some agreed with their portrayals and some didn’t. Some were mad about being in the book at all. Others were mad about being left out. Some told me how they felt and some didn’t. Some read it and some didn’t, or at least claim they didn’t. The only consistent thing I’ve noticed is that people rarely react the way I would have expected.

Here are some consequence questions I would suggest asking yourself instead (a few are legal): If you knew the person you’re writing about would sue you for defamation, would you still write it? Would you write it the same way? Would you publish it? Could you defend your portrayal, if it came to that? In terms of interpersonal consequences: Who are you willing to offend or even lose for the sake of the work? Who are you not? (It can be a useful exercise to make lists of both.) Could you leave them out and still write the piece successfully? Do you believe you need permission to portray other people? All of them, or only some, and which ones, and why? What will you do if they say no? If you’re going to write it anyway, why ask for their permission? If they say yes, will you let them read it before publication? Will you let them change it? Even if you think your portrayal is fair and accurate? Even if you feel like it compromises the work?

Another common kind of question I hear is about ethics or morals—basically, whether it’s “OK” to do certain things when portraying other people. The problem with those questions is that they all lead immediately to another question: According to whom? When I was a journalist, I learned one community’s ethical guidelines for writing about other people. When I became a creative writer, I found out we have a completely different set, if we have any at all. Documentary filmmakers have their own. Even within those communities, there is no consensus about the ethics of portrayal. Practitioners, critics, and audiences often have wildly different beliefs about what’s acceptable. And the people you’re writing about may be operating within very different ethical frameworks from the ones we think about. So there is no clear way to say what’s OK.

It’s surprisingly hard even to narrow that question down to individual morality. You might have a well-developed moral position on the question of writing about other people. But the person you’re writing about might have a different one. So might your agent, editor, or the people who read or review your work. Do I think it’s morally OK to write something deeply unflattering about your older brother and publish it? Absolutely. But I’m only saying that because I’ve done it.

Then there’s the most important kind of questions, and the hardest to answer: the questions you have to ask yourself to define your own beliefs about portraying other people. For example: Do you think people should have the right to determine how they’re portrayed in a permanent medium? Do you think they should have the right to not be written about? Do you think portrayals need to be accurate? Do you think they can be? Would you feel the same way if you were the one being portrayed? Do you think people know or see themselves accurately enough to judge another person’s portrayal of them? Do you think it’s possible to portray another person in a public way and not have it affect your relationship with them? (I don’t.) Do you think it’s OK for your writing to harm another person? What kind of repercussions are you willing to accept? What’s more important to you, if you have to choose: your art or your relationship to that person? Do you also think about your self-portrayal, and whether that portrayal is honest or generous or kind, or accurate to who you really are?

Chronicle of a Summer ends with the two filmmakers walking down a hall after the screening, discussing the conversation. “It can all be summed up in two arguments,” one says. “Either our characters are blamed for not being true enough, or they’re being blamed for being too true.”