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.