Faction is fiction. It’s a novel based on real events and real people but narrated as a story, not as history or biography. These days, faction is massively popular, the most prominent example being Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning double Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.

Yet, is it fair to use real people as material for novels? The ‘real’ character in Mantel’s Booker novels is long-dead: Cromwell was executed in 1540 and so can hardly be libelled and neither can his grieving widow be offended. He’s safely swirled in history.

However, faction doesn’t just use historical figures. In 2006, David Peace wrote The Damned United which was then made into a film. That novel provoked a libel suit from Johnny Giles and anger from Brian Clough’s family.

So, are ‘real’ people fair game for novelists? The success of The Damned United surely lay in the vigorous, peppery, arrogant voice of Clough, which David Peace captured absolutely. Brian Clough was ‘a character’ in real life, and was then made literally a character in a novel, but who can blame the author for taking inspiration from such a colourful man? A novelist’s job is to capture on paper brilliant and larger-than-life characters, of whom Brian Clough was certainly one.

Perhaps the families feel violated as the novel purports to show Clough’s ‘real’ feelings. However, countless biographies, articles and video footage exist of him, a lot of which is controversial, such as the film of him punching drunken fans who invaded the pitch. I’d say that showed his ‘real’ feelings, and can be replayed endlessly on YouTube. There’s also reportage and glorious photos of him winning the European Cup. Don’t they show his ‘real’ feelings also? The faction novel is just another way of doing it, but one which punches deeper than a grainy photograph or wobbly camera footage.

Another example of faction which caused anger was Wintering by Kate Moses. This is an account of Sylvia Plath’s life before her suicide. There was particular animosity around Wintering as the telling of Plath’s life – and death – has always gone hand-in-hand with controversy. Her estate is notoriously reluctant to allow journalists and authors to quote from her work and her late husband, Ted Hughes, was famed for his reticence about her. This is understandable, of course, as Sylvia left two small children when she died. Naturally, the family wanted to shield them but, at time of Wintering’s publication, they were both adults and knew the circumstances of their mother’s awful death.  So, was Kate Moses right to use Plath’s life as a novel? I say yes. Firstly, whether it sounds crass or not, it is an interesting story: Sylvia was a magnificent poet and lived a life almost unnervingly full of talent, joy, panic and love. Secondly, her death was hijacked rather by the feminist cause who saw her as a victim of men.  Her husband had red paint thrown at him when reading in public and Sylvia’s grave has been repeatedly vandalised by those who demand his name is removed from her headstone. So, these arrogant fools seize on the sensational aspects of Sylvia’s life: her marriage to Ted Hughes, his infidelity and her suicide. This can often blur the force and wonder of her poetry as her life story can stand in the way. Wintering removes this ugly sensationalism by showing Sylvia as a mother and writer, not as a doomed drama queen. We see her in her dressing gown warming bottles for the babies. We see her dragging a portable heater through her freezing flat so her icy fingers can type. Most poignantly, we see her struggle into a London phone box whilst balancing the babies and a pram loaded with damp laundry. She is made human, warm and there. She is not, as her daughter Frieda Hughes said, the Sylvia Suicide Doll. The novel makes her something less fantastic but equally real.

Finally, does the profusion of faction suggest our novelists are running out of ideas? Hardly. When it comes to plots, there is nothing new under the sun and boy-meets-girl has been done and done and done again. There’s no shame in saying it’s hard, or impossible, to keep thinking up new plots for stories. The great Beryl Bainbridge used her own life in her novels, saying openly that when she exhausted the material she’d simply turn to historical events, and so she did, with her later novels about the Titanic and the Crimean War. So, as they say, plots are for graveyards. It’s the characters which drive the story and, should an author take Brian Clough or Thomas Cromwell or the inimitable Sylvia Plath for his inspiration then it’s natural to pursue that, and natural that we’d want to read it.