Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Friends as Characters

So, I'm just beginning to flesh out a basic outline of my second novel. When that's done I'll share more about that process, but right now let's talk about characters.

Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is NOT purely coincidental

Someone once said, "All writing is autobiography." I wish whoever said that would tell my family that doesn't mean they have to psychoanalyze everything I write to see if I'm getting depressed or psychotic. What that statement really means is that writing is based on our personal experiences. Even when we imagine the most unrealistic, fantastical situations, we're still basing those ideas on what we know.

How boring would writing be if every character were some variation of the author? Certainly characters must be diverse enough that their motivations and idiosyncrasies make them interact in interesting and enjoyable ways. If all writing were purely autobiographical, all characters would be the same person, have the same motivations and thus would never come into conflict.

The characters in my novel are somewhat autobiographical because they are a collection of traits I've seen in people I've known. I'm asked, every time I write something with a female character, whether that character "is" a particular romantic interest from my past. It never is. In fact, I avoid using any trait from that person just so I can say with confidence that no character is based on her. But while I never copy friends outright, I often incorporate aspects of their personality, history and appearance in building more believable characters.

A pinch of you, a dash of him, and a hint of Daddy issues...

When building a character, this is the process I use:

1) Define the major motivations of the character. What do they want most in life?
2) What events happened in the character's life to make them want what they do?
3) What about those events affect the mannerisms, appearance, reputation etc. of the character?


Sometimes, a character's motivations hew closely to those of people I've known in my own life. For instance, in my first novel, there is a character who has given up a personal hobby because his fiancee disapproves. Here, the character's major motivation is to make his fiancee happy, which makes one wonder why someone would endure a relationship in which they are expected to give up something they love?

As I developed this character's history, I considered those people I've known who experienced something similar. I knew a guy who went to law school because his fiancee wanted him to have a better career, and a girl who took up mountain sports in order to please her boyfriend. I took these people, thought about everything I know about them and their relationships, and used that to craft the character.

Some friends who have read my work comment that they thought one character or another seemed very similar to someone they knew. And they were right! Because that character was based in small part on a mutual friend. Other times, those same people fail to see the connection between characters and people they know, including themselves, because I use more than one real person to craft a single character.

It is lazy writing to completely copy a real person (outside the context of a biography, of course), and potentially libelous to boot, but failing to find some basis in reality can make characters bland at best, generic and perhaps even offensively stereotypical at worst. If you're stuck in the process of building a character, consider your friends and keep building traits until you have a character who is so real you could imagine having a real conversation with them.

Just don't go writing about that one, former romantic interest everyone expects you to. I can't imagine that ever going well.

-J.

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