I am just thinking about characters. And, how we might be inspired to use parts of real personalities, experiences, thoughts etc in our main character or perhaps through a sub character. Do you prefer writing with characters very similar to yourself or your perception of someone you know? Do you prefer writing about characters who you don’t have much in common with? As a reader, I love appreciating characters and how they feel, even if I am nothing like them or don’t agree with everything they do. I think for me, being able to feel a strong empathy to the “realness” of the emotions felt by the characters, and connect with them, is a character done well. So, I wonder how this is primarily inspired!
My characters tend to be all over the place My characters feel the most real to me when I'm able to describe in depth how they're similar to and different from myself and from each other, regardless of how much is similarities and how much of it is differences. This is the largest part of why I love personality profiling systems so much and have had such great success in using them, even though the consensus seems to be that most writers are indifferent at best (finding personality profiles to be a waste of time) and frequently hate them with the rage of a thousand Suns (seeing them as creating characters as 2-dimensional cardboard cutouts instead of fleshed out human beings).
Visualising things on paper or equivalent is really important to me - for my professional job (writer, but communications, not fiction), I use customer empathy maps to visualise and this is essentially a personality profile for my characters (seperately)
My characters are a melting pot of traits, quirks, idiosyncrasies, flaws and habits, drawn from an archive of everyone I've ever known, or characters I've read about. I guess it could certainly be said that my main characters have more traits shared with me personally, because I know them the best. However, the main character in my story is a highly-strung, fairly angry, chain-smoking female French politician, which is nothing like me at all.
Yes, it's interesting how all these things get drawn from people you know IRL, have known, or inspired by a character. And by the time you're done, they barely represent the inspiration at all, because it's a complete mash up.
Yep! It's useful because, well firstly we're drawing from the familiar which is handy, but secondly because our characters are then helped along the road of being realistic since their traits are drawn from real people in the first place.
And one of the best feelings is when you meet someone, or see another side to someone you already know, and the trait sticks out to you as something to include in a character in some way.
Yeah. I've done that a few times. It's like finding a new piece to a jigsaw puzzle and thinking about where you can slot it in.
