Writing Blog

20220525 On Characters

May 25, 2022, 11:00am

“Where do your characters come from?”

This is the question I find hardest to answer when it comes to writing. I know where my ideas come from, my settings, my complications, all of that, but characters? That’s tougher.

I should say, this applies only to stories that are set in the real world. I find writing fantasy characters much easier, because the lack of technology and the fact that in a realistic fantasy world work becomes such a large part of a character’s persona makes it easier to put them into a world I’ve made up.

So… whence? Well, like many writers, when I started, the characters were simply people I knew transposed onto the page. My high school friends used to have “fun” picking out who was who in my stories. Then I hit upon the idea of combining two or three people I knew to create unique characters, though it was still based on people I knew. Sometimes I would include an idealised version of a person, but that always came across as cringe-worthy… in hindsight (*sigh!).

I did avoid using characters from films, TV and other books, though – I grounded my characters in those people I saw in real life.

Then for whatever reason, some time in my late-20s, I stopped using people I knew. Reading my work from back then, it was gradual. I think what happened was that I had used everybody I knew well enough to put into a story, and so started to pick and choose from many, many subjects and people to make more and more amalgamated characters. It also appears that at this time I became confident enough to just make people up entirely.

So, what do I use when choosing a character? I have come to a point where I like my characters have these things:
1) Realism. No mighty heroes, no abilities outside the norm. If they can do something, it has to be related to a job or a hobby that is established, and makes cultural sense. So, for example, my Australian characters cannot use guns (in general).
2) Imperfections. No-one is perfect. And imperfections are not just “has a mole on her left cheek”. They are normally along the lines of “has trouble in relationships” or “over-confident” or “unsure of what is going on” or some other thing that may not matter to the story core, but gives the character depth.
3) Community. People do not exist in their own little bubble. Even the most reclusive of characters has some form of community, interacts with something external (usually other characters). This is important because it can help the writer show who the character is.

So, to that question where do your characters come from… sorry, I have no idea. I like to say the characters come to me from another realm if reality and I simply write their story, so we’ll leave it at that.

Happy writing!