By and large, I find myself to be a very boring person. Of course, many of our characters are proably somewhat dull in their "real lives." Those characters just have the fortunate (misforunate?) experience of their lives being turned upside down (be it a cheating spouse, mutant dinsaurs, or aliens from Mars). They get to react accordingly. Heck, if my town was attacked by martians, I bet my life would seem a LOT more interesting.
My characters usually come from an image and are a product of the story I want to tell. Very rarely do I come up with the characters first, and then seek a story to tell (those are all sitting in the Idle Story Ideas folder). Sometimes they are amalgams of people I've known in real life, people I've met briefly or read about in the newspaper. I think many writers are natural observers; we watch and we absorb the people around us.
And in writing this response, it also occurred to me that in my two completed novels (and in each of my WIP's), there is one character in each that is very close to me emotionally. They have a similar temperment, react to stress and fear in comparable ways. Their backstories are very, very different from mine (not to mention their gender), and half the time they don't live now (near-future for most of them). My beta could probably figure out which characters they are (and maybe family if/when they ever read my stuff).
Character creation is great fun for me, but that probably comes from years of online PBEM gaming, and creating OC's for various games.
