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'm teaching Stephen King's On Writing this semester, and this is something he says in the section we discussed today: that all characters in fiction are essentially aspects of ourselves.

I would agree with that re: my own writing. Even when I am writing fanfic and I must be careful to characterize and to write voices that jive with what we're presented in character, the facets of a character that I choose to foreground are generally the ones that resonate with me most, the grace notes of the character's life that we don't see onscreen or in the book generally come from my own, and where applicable I try to include emotional resonance from my own life in the lives of these characters.

I don't write a lot of original fic; most of the rest of what I write is memoir, and that IS me. LOL

[ayumidah]

I have a character named Aaron that a friend tells me reminds her a lot of me. But I think while most of my characters have a little of me in them, they're vastly different as well because if all of my characters were exactly like me, that'd stop being fun after awhile, haha.

[inkdust]

All of my characters have something of me in them, sometimes in more obvious ways and sometimes not so. One of absolute favorites is one I always viewed as quite different from me until I realized that I had taken some of my flaws and more hidden qualities and brought them to the forefront in her. In the end I think my favorite characters are the ones who resonate most, who I can best understand, and sometimes I think those are more similar to me and sometimes they're more different.

[serria]

I loved King's On Writing. I've heard it recommended as one of the only "how to write" manuals worth your money. Would you agree?

Philosophically, to answer OP's question, I absolutely think that all developed characters are parts of us. Maybe not the part of our personality that we present, or the part of our brain that we use every day, but to give a character life, whether hero or villain, it has to come from the author. I like to think that all good characters are reflections of an author.

That being said, it is a bit philosophical. On a direct and surface level, I wouldn't say I'm anything like most of my characters, beyond maybe a quirk here or there and a way of observing the world. It's kind of funny - "Serria", my username, is the name of the main character in my fantasy series. I first made her up when I was something like nine years old and started writing stories. I did online role-playing then, and so adopted the name as my handle. Serria is the character I've put the most work into, by far, as today I'm taking those ideas and trying to make a real story out of them... but even though I still use it as my username, the character's personality is polar opposite of my own. It's my identity, but not actually - that's how I view my relationship with most of my developed characters.

[serria]

Haha, now I'm imagining a book with a cast of characters that are pretty much me. Put them in a room together, they'd probably kill each other. lol :) I hear lots of professional authors comment that people ask them if (insert protagonist) is actually supposed to be them. I wonder if readers, especially those who know the author, think that often?

[serria]

I agree with what you've said. All developed characters have something from us in them, even if it isn't our surface personality. Some kind of flaw, strength, desire, quirk, way of thinking... I think it'd be hard to make a character that had nothing at all from the author.

[sarillia]

I read On Writing a while back but to be honest anything I got out of it has kind of blurred into the rest of the writing advice I've liked in my mind.

It's interesting that you mention the characters voices. That's the thing I have the hardest time with. Which I think is part of why I like writing characters who are very different from me. I don't worry so much about them sounding like me. But I know they still come from me on some level.

[sarillia]

That's funny, my username comes from one of my characters too! I'm not sure why I've connected so much with that character and not others though.

[inkdust]

I'm actually struggling a little bit with my current story because a number of superficial and circumstantial details about my main character are similar to mine - age, education, her initial living situation is a lot like mine in college, she can't cook - even though in the more significant aspects she's very different from me, and when my mom has read bits of my draft she always points these things out. So I have a considerable SHE'S NOT ME complex with this one, and I'm afraid that other people who know me will think that.

[ayumidah]

And now I'm picturing a fight to the death between characters so similar they can all tell what the others are going to do next so it's unending ;)

[lunabee34]

I liked it as much for the writing manual aspect of the book as I did the memoir aspect of the book. I've been a huge King fan since I was a teenager, and it was really interesting to learn about his life and where the ideas for some of his books came from. :)

[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.