"Who would be a muse, eh? Loads of people, that’s the thing. Dante wrote about his childhood crush Beatrice di Folco Portinari in The Divine Comedy."

"Jane Austen used an old flame as inspiration for Mr Darcy. Charles Dickens based numerous characters on his lover Ellen Ternan. It was all fine and nobody minded. So what changed? Two words: the internet. Online, everybody gets to create a bubble where they are the star of their own finely honed story. So when someone else mines their life for a different story, it feels more like a violation. Also, who’s to say that Ternan enjoyed being written about? She couldn’t complain on Facebook. Does this story have a moral? Yes: it’s that writers are terrible people and you should cut them all from your life immediately."

From "‘Bad art friend’: should fiction writers ever lift stories from other people’s lives?/Great writers have always been inspired by friends and lovers, but a viral article has revived the moral arguments around muses. In the age of the internet, does using someone else’s story feel like a violation?" (The Guardian).

The "viral article" is "Who Is the Bad Art Friend?/Art often draws inspiration from life — but what happens when it’s your life? Inside the curious case of Dawn Dorland v. Sonya Larson" by Robert Kolker (NYT). I haven't read that, but The Guardian — after calling it "punishingly long" — summarizes it as "a woman donated her kidney to a stranger, and then a second woman wrote a story about donating a kidney to a stranger." 

At the NYT, one commenter puts it this way:

So... Dawn donates a kidney for whatever reason, I mean who cares? Then posts about it, then gets involved in a more pub[l]ic way, and... a bunch of writers secretly deride her (why, exactly? Guilt they aren't doing enough? Just plain pettiness?). Then one of those writers, Larson, uses the feelings she feels about this kidney donation to craft a story, using Dawn's actual words, never telling her, and then Larson has the gall to use racism as a defense? As a BIPOC artist, I take offense to Larson's re-characterization of what she, in fact, did - steal, plagiarize, and - while not illegal - Larson's ruthless backstabbing of someone she found ridiculous. It makes it harder for artists of color to cite racism when it actually occurs What was happening to Larson during her "summer of hell" and beyond was the result of her own lack of integrity and dishonesty and, yes, I'll say it, entitlement.

ADDED: Yes, there's a racial theme in the NYT article — which now sounds "punishing" in more ways than just length.

“My piece is fiction,” [Larson] wrote. “It is not her story, and my letter is not her letter. And she shouldn’t want it to be. She shouldn’t want to be associated with my story’s portrayal and critique of white-savior dynamics. But her recent behavior, ironically, is exhibiting the very blindness I’m writing about, as she demands explicit identification in — and credit for — a writer of color’s work.” 

Here was a new argument, for sure. Larson [the POC writer] was accusing Dorland [the white organ donor] of perverting the true meaning of the story — making it all about her, and not race and privilege. Larson’s friend Celeste Ng agrees, at least in part, that the conflict seemed racially coded. “There’s very little emphasis on what this must be like for [Larson],” Ng told me, “and what it is like for writers of color, generally — to write a story and then be told by a white writer, ‘Actually, you owe that to me.’”