Your characters' personalities and your own

[sarillia]

How much of your character's personalities come from you?

I've heard some writers say that every character is a facet of themselves and I agree with that to a point. But some people put bits of themselves into their characters more consciously.

I tend to mix in conflicts that I've dealt with as subplots or character arcs. The character is not exactly like me so they deal with it differently but they are enough like me to be dealing with the same problem.

On the other end of the spectrum, I love writing characters who are very different from me. I've always been kind of insecure and I love writing really arrogant characters. Plus I just think it's fun to build a character starting with a fault and make them likeable anyway.

Do you enjoy writing characters who are like you or who are different from you or some combination?

Comments

[lunabee34]

I have to be honest and say that beyond composition textbooks, I'm not familiar with many writing manuals beyond King's or Peter Elbow's which is older than me, I think, and not one I would recommend to anyone at this point (although his writing pedagogy still informs comp/rhetoric teaching to an extent). I do think King's worth the money, though. It has good advice, it isn't prescriptive, and it isn't overly fussy. I don't agree with everything he says in the book, but overall, I think it's useful.