Channeling Marilyn: 5 Tips for Fictionalizing a Dead Celebrity

It was never part of my writing career plan to fictionalize screen goddess Marilyn Monroe, and put her in a novel. Nope, pretty much like every story I write, the idea for my “Marilyn” novel came to me in a lightning flash. I remember the moment like it was yesterday.

There I was sitting at the kitchen island with my then teenaged daughter, looking through a copy of Teen Vogue. Leafing through the pages, an ad popped out at me. It was maybe for a perfume or a clothing brand, and there was the model all done up like Marilyn Monroe, pin-up style. My thought was: Damn, the woman’s been dead for over 50 years, and these vultures just won’t leave her alone.

We kept looking at the mag and, bang, there was a young pop singer all done up like Marilyn. Well, that got my writer mind humming: What would Marilyn think of these pics? You know, like if her spirit was up there on a cloud looking down.

Over the next few months, I kept running into images of and references to Marilyn Monroe, and my “what if” thought surfaced time and time again: Who would Marilyn’s spirit visit if she could come back? Then why? Then what would happen? Before long I had the bones of what would become my YA paranormal fantasy Channeling Marilyn. Briefly, Channeling Marilyn tells the story of timid, plus-size 17-year-old Lexa Donovan whose life goes dangerously sideways when the spirit of Marilyn Monroe takes up residence in her body.

Creating a character based on Marilyn Monroe taxed my writing in every way. I spent the next decade working on the manuscript and, each time I went into the story, I learned more and more about my Marilyn character. I also learned more and more about the depth and complexity of crafting such a character. Here are my top five tips—or maybe take-aways is a better term.

This first “tip” truly sums up the most important truth I learned about fictionalizing long dead Hollywood goddess Marilyn Monroe. When I first began to write my Marilyn character, my brain was full of “how cool is this?” and “how original is this story?” Soon, my other main character and secondary characters began to take shape, and I was well on my way to having a workable plot. Then I began doing extensive character work.

Here is where I started interrogating deeply why I was writing about Marilyn Monroe. Sure, she was gorgeous, talented, and mysterious. Sure, she came from a troubled background and worked her butt off to become the star she was (and still is). And sure, since I was a kid I’ve been a huge fan of her movies. All, all great starting reasons for choosing to write about Marilyn. Although, as I quickly learned, not reasons resonant enough to inspire a fully developed character.

Through much revision, I discovered that all my initial inspirations around Marilyn were true, but there was more: Wasn’t I also fascinated by the world of fans who worship her, some calling her “angel”? Yes, and here was where I understood that the fandom and pop culture obsession was at the heart of the character I was creating.

Over more years of drafting, I spent more time thinking and pondering and dreaming about my character, and during these years many people would ask me why I was writing about Marilyn, or more specifically, about my version of her as a spirit. After reading all about her life, stardom and death, the only answer I had was that I wanted to “give her a different story.”

It wasn’t until draft number one hundred and who knows what that I discovered a truth that clearly I wasn’t ready to understand when I started writing the book. The idea for Channeling Marilyn came to me in 2010 about a year after my niece Maggie died, very young. Then in 2024, my nephew Michael died, also very young. After my nephew’s death, I took a grief workshop where I learned that a writing tool for processing grief is to write a “different story” about the lost loved one. In a lightning flash like the initial inspiration for the book, I understood that that is what I’d been doing with Channeling Marilyn: that part of my need to give Marilyn a “different” story had to do with unprocessed grief over my niece and the processing of my grief over my nephew.

With this realization, so much about my novel fell into place. It may have taken years and a ton of work, but I believe all that time was extremely well-spent because my self-interrogation led me to the deepest and most personal root of “why” I chose to create Marilyn Monroe’s spirit and put her in a novel.

As I wrote my early crappy drafts, I spent dozens of hours researching Marilyn Monroe, studying: movies, interviews, pictures, photos, books, memoirs, interviews with her and others. I journaled about every Marilyn experience I had. I meditated on them, pondered them widely and, again, spent the time letting every bit of information, inspiration, and observation sink in.

As my character is a spirit version of Marilyn, I didn’t use much of what I learned of her life in the story, though all the research gave me a strong sense of my own thoughts of her as a performer and a personality—the two most important factors I needed to understand to create the character.    

I knew from the get-go that I wanted to write about who and what Marilyn’s spirit would be, not do a Marilyn Monroe life-rehash. Though I felt like I knew her a little through all of my research, I understood I would never be able to speak for her truly, and I had no interest in adding to the existing lore abut Marilyn’s life and death. None of that was my story to tell. No.

My “Marilyn slant” would be to create my version of who her spirit would be after being dead for over 60 years. That would be the basis for the fantasy of who my spirit-Marilyn would visit and why.  

When I began drafting the book, I showed some of the early pages to one of my most trusted writing mentors and, while he didn’t discourage me, he told me something that stuck with me through every revision. His advice went something like this: “If you’re going to put Marilyn Monroe in your book, she’d better be on every page.”

I took that to mean, that if I had the audacity to write fiction about a real person, especially a mega-Hollywood star with an epic fandom, my character had better be a fully living breathing character in every possible way, not just “arm candy.” I’ve read books that do a bit of famous person/celeb name-dropping, and I’ve got to say that if that character doesn’t have agency and true impact in the story, well, I feel cheated.

This “tip” relates to #4, but goes a step farther. Not only must the celeb character relate fully to the main character and story, but they must also have their own story arc within the greater plot.

What I mean is beautifully explained by a comment author Dennis Lehane made during an interview I did with him a bunch of years ago. We were talking about his use of a true second person point of view in his brilliant short story “Until Gwen.” He said that a writer really needed to know why they were using a second person POV for a story because it was so powerful that if it was ill-chosen, it would be like, “bringing an AK-47 to a knife fight.”

I think those words apply to fictionalizing celebrities—dead or not—and I certainly held his words close while I was writing Channeling Marilyn.

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