Where do Characters come from?

Mistook said:

Are they peices of our personality?

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For my own writing, this is almost entirely the case. My leads all seem to be slightly neurotic and respectfully domesticated (or on the verge of respectful domestication. My minor characters come from people I know, for the most part, or are, in some way, sort of extensions of my main character (thereby an extension of myself.) Easy to say, hard to explain correctly, but when I'm in the groove, and writing, it makes sense, and hopefully makes sense later on, when I do my rewrite.

A government plot to drive writers crazy?

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No, any good conspiracy theorist knows that they finished with us a while back.

In order to understand the universe we must internalize it to some degree. In order to understand other people we have to internalize them. This means we have a program, or model if you will, of them inside our heads. What adult does not know what their mother or father would say in any given circumstance? After people have been married some time they know exactly how their spouse would react to any given stimulus.

Those who are most judgemental are the least able to internalize others. The "He's an idiot or he would do it my way," type will seldom understand anyone, even themselves.

People who are more accepting will have access to a wider range of internal characters and will be able to understand a wider range of real people.

Some people have a creative streak that combines and recombines people, traits, etc. to the point where they develop intenal models of people they never knew -- These are the writer's characters who develop an "independant" life. It is the writer's ability to understand a person they have never met, but who could exist.

i agree with that, wa, but i'd add that there's a difference between internalizing and stereotyping/profiling. people advertise their philosophy by the way they look, usually, and a tremendous amount of assumption can be made there. some of it may even be correct, heh heh. rest assured there's not going to be a lot of guys strolling around in a silk armani suit who hops in his '92 escort and drives back to his trailer... unless he's hiding something, at least. nah, it's probably fair to assume he's going home to the nice part of town. and here i go assuming again, but a CEO-type person who focuses on the bottom-line i think is naturally going to lean towards being a republican, with its own set of assumptions right there. that's the basis for half a character, eh?

it's not always that easy, though, right? you have to balance out stereotypes with real-life experience. and beyond people you've known for years and years and years, you won't truly know very many people in your life. you probably really don't even know the people you think you know as well as you think you know them. you might know their reactions and overall thought processes, but you don't know what your dad's doing at the office or what mom's doing when you're at school. you don't know what they fantasize about most of the time or what goes on behind closed doors.

people have secrets and those partially make up who they are, no? it's the writer's job to give them the secrets that define them, or lack of secrets that make them, ah, boring yet readable. i guess you just have to study people and listen to what they say. most people babble endlessly once you get them going to the point where you say, 'okay, shut up, please (rather like my posts, lol).'

'Those who are most judgemental are the least able to internalize others. The "He's an idiot or he would do it my way," type will seldom understand anyone, even themselves.

'People who are more accepting will have access to a wider range of internal characters and will be able to understand a wider range of real people.' because i'm a contrary s.o.b., this is the part of the post i find rather on the philosophic b.s. side with heavy hippie leanings. gawd, it was pretty to read, though. i just wish i understood what it meant in no uncertain terms without the rather self-serving message pinned to the undertone. if what this means is you stick to a psychologically sound 'model' of the character and justify in reasonable ways how and why he does and thinks the way he does, okay. i can buy that if that's what you mean by 'understand,' because i can relate that to plausible motivations. if, however, what you mean is every writer has to be philosophically perfect (which comes off as saying 'like me', rounding out the evidence of you understanding the universe), that's nonsense. i say all this because the overall gist here is 'you can't be judgemental and write real characters.' aren't we all judgemental hypocrites to some degree? haven't most writers absolutely destroyed a person in fiction they know in real life? isn't that judgemental?

i'm just pickin' on ya, wa. i found a lot of merit in what you said. i just tried to get you to judge me to make a point that it doesn't take a great brain, flawless philosophy, subscribing to your or anyone else's set of morals and expectations, or the pretentions of knowing someone to the nth degree to create 'real' characters (which borders on a contradiction in terms, no?). i'm sure your characters are great, despite your near master of the universe proclamation. just that more than being one with the wood nymphs and dolphins, maybe a good set of eyes and ears and common sense will help your characters more, eh? i think i'm stuck on this whole vague 'internalizing' term. does that mean you suck up their souls like a space vampire?

hell, i'm usually fairly good as creating 'profiles' of people based on what they write. i know i had you all wrong. i still think you sound like a woman, though. don't ask me why.

in conclusion, i need sleep. i think wa's last paragraph was the best way of putting it. *that* i grasped, lol. i'm sure i just took the rest the wrong way for some dumb reason. maybe because i'm dumb? lol. probably that's the case. at any rate, i think any understanding a writer gleans comes mostly from experience that they instill in their character, then having that character do what they do based on believable motivations. side characters are usually 'cause-and-effect' 'personalities', as they should be i suppose, but your main characters have to have good reason.

is it fair to say that most main characters are idealized versions of the writer projecting their personality onto paper, influenced by the story situation and experiences of the writer, which shapes his philosophy? hm, that sounds kinda quacky. these are the types of characters that i like. i mean, if you internalize everyone you ever meet, who the hell does that make you? does that make you a watered-down person who pops out mary sues by the baleful? this is probably why i identify with anti-heroes so well, because i can believe a character who has a shady side (which, to me, most interesting people do): at some point, a great anti-hero goes beyond seeming like a character and more like an extension of the writer to me. that might not speak very well of the writer himself a lot of times, but i appreciate the feeling of honesty behind it, true or not.

i believe a writer's personality comes through in his characters. the trick real trick, it seems, is to let go of your secrets and bare yourself to the world. if you can't do that, you may sell a lot of books, but is there any truth in the words? truth is art. if you're not being honest, don't dare call yourself an 'artist' around me. being a musician, mm, you should know exactly what i mean, no?

I don't think characters are necessarily based on their authors. a certain amount of imilarity is inevitable, but I frequently come up with characters different from me.

I generally come up with characters by thinking fo a role in the story or a character who would do some specific thing. often they're nothing like me when i first come up with them. they are often intially defined by one overpowering trait, and rarely one i possess. the similarities to me come in development. i find that my characters get more like me as they go along, slowly picking up some of my personality and some of my thought processes.

interstingly, characters who are very similar to me intially stay the same, but characters whoa re nothing like me often end up more like em than the others.

all this only applies to major characters. the more minor a character is, the less they adapt to become like me.

Characters

For the most part, my characters arrive from various components of the following areas:

• my personality
• others personalities
• my ideals
• my faults
• experiences of myself and others
• observations of others
• stereotypes

I think that covers most of the sources, but I am sure there are others.

I am an avid eavesdropper and observer, and I cannot help it as I have been doing this all my life. Working in the public gives me an opportunity to do this as well (though currently, as it's 3rd shift, I get mostly drunks), and I can often predict traits and behaviors with high accuracy. I have always had an interest in pyschology and human behavior.

Characters

There's certainly a good bit of me in many of my characters, but as much as possible, my characters are all the people I've known throughout my life.

We all have a worldview and tend to cubbyhole or categorize people we know and people we don't know except by culture --- what we hear on the news, national geographic programs, and the like.

I pull characters out of my worldview, give them a voice, faults, actions, and interactions then wait for them to surprise me.

Writing Again said:

Those who are most judgemental are the least able to internalize others. The "He's an idiot or he would do it my way," type will seldom understand anyone, even themselves.

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I know someone who has a hard time sympathizing with characters who don't fit his ideas or do exactly what he thinks he would do in a given situation. "So why the hell doesn't X just take a gun with him and shoot the werewolf with a silver bullet?" (The answers in this instance - a published and very good book - include but are not limited to: He's a college student who elsewhere in the story rather obviously *doesn't* do physical confrontations. He's in a place where even people who use guns in real life don't usually take them. He's with someone who is still getting over a major violent trauma, and the last thing she'd want to see was a gun, or a weapon, or any sign there was a danger still out there. {Which led to him saying, she should be reassured by seeing a gun, as if that was the only response a severely traumatized person could possibly have.}. The werewolf wasn't one in the traditional sense and probably would not have been stopped by any form of bullet....). But instead of being open to what the writer was conveying, he tried to wedge all three characters (Guy, girl, and wolf) into his assumptions about what they were, and got pissed off at the book basically for not being written by him.

I saw the same pattern repeated with several other books, though this example jumps most strongly to mind.

I've also seen him, describing the plot of a book to someone else, actually quote not the plot as it was, but as HE would have written it, unaware of the alteration. (Listening to his plot summary of The Left Hand of Darkness was rather entertaining, but did leave me wondering what book he'd actually read.)

Oddly enough, I found most of his characters to be versions of himself as he would be with that character's interestingly tragic background. Not always a Mary-Sue (Or maybe just not a bad one), but often. He could NOT put himself in someone else's shoes.

(He does this to people in the real world, too, but that's another conversation.)

Lenora Rose said:

I know someone who has a hard time sympathizing with characters who don't fit his ideas or do exactly what he thinks he would do in a given situation.

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Interesting! I have a character like this. It boils down to empathy, IMO. Authors who have it can better imagine themselves in all kinds of situations, regardless of the proximity to their own experiences. They don't have to write about themselves.

Preyer mentioned secrets, which is one of my favorite topics when constructing characters. Sol Stein suggested it, and I've had loads of fun doing it: give each character a secret. Not necessarily one that has to do with the plot, or that's even a big deal, but something he'd really rather other characters not know.

Excellent discussion!

This has been a terrific discussion thus far. Therefore I'll muck it up... ha ha

My characters come from several sources. First, I have an essential character who's critical to my story. For example, my progatonist in my series of private detective novels is, gasp, a private eye.

He has some police buddies of various types. And he has some shady pals, and he is dating this one woman.

So some of these characters are therefore intentionally created for a specific role, to understandably flesh out the protagonist's universe.

In my newly started novel, a Stephen King-ish horror story, I have populated a small Gulf Coast fishing community with several main characters. I have the stoic male police chief, the heroin-addicted female coroner, an alcoholic TV news writer, a sexually obsessed female attorney, the owner of a small shrimping fleet who has an autistic child he's ashamed of, and so on. My premise is that "everyone has a secret" and that these failings will factor into the story.

Being a horror novel, I'll naturally kill off most of these folks as I go (heh, heh). I actually haven't decided who will survive -- "I alone am 'scaped to tell thee" -- and who will surmount their past failings to persevere.

In both cases, the cast of characters could slip into sterotype, especially since I'm writing genre fiction. It's my job as a writer to avoid this pitfall.

However I think that I find myself creating other characters out of the need to fulfill Jungian Archetypal roles. As I write, I've found myself suddenly having a character "appear" and surprise me that he/she has made an entrance.

Later on, that character may fade or blossom as I tweak, but the very existence of some characters seem to be flowing from my subconscious.

One of the most interesting things about secrets is they are so character specific: For instance a Morman I know has a secret vice, she takes a sip of coffee every now and then: A man I know at work is afraid to tell his wife he talks with a woman over lunch who enjoys fishing for fear his wife will think he is being "emotionally unfaithful" (Whatever the hell that is): While another never told his wife of five years he has a concealed weapons permit because she is so anti violence: Oh, and the gal who pretends that she gave up chocolate: Not to mention the gal I know who kept a tattoo on her thigh secret from her husband for two years.

Many secrets people take seriously border on the comic.

Writing Again said:

Many secrets people take seriously border on the comic.

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I really enjoy sharing secrets with characters in all the books I write and read. It doesn't matter how funny or silly they are. Though many times they can make me chuckle. It gives us a chance to get in the head of the character and know something about them personally. We all share one thing - secrets. And some things are so universal that we can really make readers connect. That is what is all about, right? Drawing readers in and creating the emotional connections.

i liked the comment about not giving away *too* much information about your character. this, i take it, has everything to do with putting that information in the exposition or prose, as his actions will, or probably should, define very sharply the type of character he is. what i was saying if i wasn't clear enough is that within that definition comes parameters, and stepping out of those parameters has to at least be strongly alluded to. it's one thing if a character suddenly picks up a cigarette half-way in the middle of the story and starts smoking after a stressful situation. we can deduce with a fair amount of probability that that character had been a smoker at some point, particularly if they buy a specific pack of cigarettes outside the mainstream (no one gets a pack of 'cloves' without knowing what they're getting themselves into, lol). but, for the beatnik to pick-up a firearm out of nowhere and start pistol-whipping his old lady, well, that's gonna take a little 'splainin', lucy, eh?

i eavesdrop all the time. when someone says something particularly interesting, i tell them i'm going to steal that. we share a chuckle as if they think i'm kidding. but, just today while at work, i heard about three different things i jotted down (that's why i'm going to miss work, which will end monday for me). they weren't interesting items in themselves, except that the words were different than what i would have used. and that's an important aspect to a character. for example: if someone says 'thanks,' you have plenty of replies. in real life, i tend to say 'you're welcome,' or if it's a chick i'll lower my voice and say, 'i'd do anything... for a lady.' when i said 'thanks' to a dude for helping me do something today, he said, 'anytime.' now, in real life, i'd never have said that, it's just not my way. it really doesn't illustrate anything about his character, per se, just that your characters shouldn't always respond the way the writer would have responded might be something to keep in mind. and i've noticed in a lot of books where what's said, minus out the 'accents', stereotypes, exaggerations, and obvious smokescreen and layering, still sounds as if the writer is speaking through the characters and not the characters having their, ah, own say. this comes down to mannerisms, too. that's surface stuff, of course, but it's also fairly crucial in it's own right. i'm sure costumers for movies go through quite the same problems as writers trying to figure out the details of a character: which outfit fits best. italian silk suits and sturgiss aren't terribly compatible, eh? (and why a murder mystery hasn't been written about that place using an amateur sleuth biker is beyond me. people lap that life-style up, not to mention that most of the bikers i've ever known tend to be relatively intelligent people on a practical level, which lends some credence to them actually being able to pull off a crime-solving deal. then again, i've met some dumber than rocks, whose only goal in life is to have women worship their penis.)

as an aside, kdad, is it possible to extract heroine from a corpse's blood and then use that extract for personal use? if nothing else, there's the basis for someone's next vampire story, heh heh. mm, why is 'share your work' dreaded?

'But at the end of the day, aren't these characters still just different faces of me? My answer to that is, unfortunately, a bit metaphysical.' what's metaphysical about that? that's exactly what i've said a thousand times before, and there's nothing philosophical about it at all, lol. to me, at least, they're conglomerations of traits, observations, psychologies and essenses in one package that i manipulate to serve my story, no mystical mumbo-jumbo in 'em as far as my characters go. i reckon if some people find their best characters by lighting candles and travelling the astral plane, that's great, but there's no grand philosophical bulls'it scheme involved in it for me, that's all i'm getting at there. eyes, ears, and a reasoning brain, tempered by common sense and experience, and, damn, what the hell else do you need to write believable characters? we all want great characters, but at some point you have to say, 'okay, my hero is a vampire hunter, not aristotle here,' no? there's always a philosophy the writer has that his character either illustrates or ponders in prose, whether we agree with it or not, but from a practical sense, how far does that have to be explored?

i see what you're saying, though, the more you explore that the better your chances of deriving something really special from it. in that sense, you're absolutely right. you have to delve deep to render subtlety a lot of the time. you have to delve deep inside yourself oftentimes. sometimes what you find sucks, but that's the best stuff. what i'm driving at in no uncertain terms is that most books people write have absolutely no epiphany-oriented material whatsoever contained inside. philosophy does not necessarily equate to epiphany, and a lot if not most epiphany people have can be found in a psychology 101 book. if you're waiting for lightbulbs going off inside your head to be able to write a character, i'd advise paying more attention to the world around you, lol.

i think you're right, too, when you said (or alluded to) writers have to be good listeners. like i mentioned, most people babble endlessly if you give them an ear and they feel they've got something to say (case in point, this post...), and secrets sometimes come out. i'd amend that, though: when you get someone to a'talkin', you have to urge 'em on a bit. just the other day i was talking to a woman who's fed up and wants a divorce from the bum of her husband, yet she won't do it. i asked her why she won't just to glean something from that, figuring that her reasons why she plans on staying would be different from mine. if i use her reasoning, is that theft? well, i've always said writers are thieves. but, is that taking advantage of her in some way? ah, that's rather a personal thing with the writer, i guess. to me, no, it's not taking advantage: i could research the situation in the library or on the net and find the same reasoning she gave (indeed, i'd probably research it anyway). is that theft, too? hardly. and if so, well, hell-fire, man, what's *not* theft? somewhere around here i've got what i guess you'd deem personality test books they put us through at work, which basically tells you what you're going to say and do before you do it or say it. a lot of people's observations and epiphanies went into that, and i used to use it so i wouldn't have to consider every possible conclusion over the course of a lifetime and still yet draw the wrong conclusion, which as a tool was a great framework for making up strongly believable and very specific characters. (i doubt writers should have the presumption they always know what they're talking about just because they thought about it to no end. that's where philosophy can screw characters up, eh? philosophy is a piss-poor substitute for psychology as far as characters go, you think?)

so, let me ask y'all this: what controls your life more, philosophy or psychology? i think a lot of people may think through a lot of philosophy just to get to the psychology, which can be gotten to a helluva lot quicker with two ounces of education. while there's something to be said for the journey, it's the end destination that matters... and what a publisher buys, right? that's not advocating opening up a book, reading a few passages, and boom, you're ready to go. characters aren't automatically preset. you should probably always ponder these things, but pondering them with the end result already there isn't going to hurt anything other than the writer's ego. screw that creative writing class-- take a psychology course. hell, take a philosophy course. those will make you better thinkers. you can learn to write better *after* that.

wa, i wholeheartedly believe in 'emotional cheating.' i believe i coined the phrase. that's probably why my ex-g/f and i never got married. i don't blame her for what she did, but i don't condone it, either, and i'll be damned if i'd put up with it. my bloated ego wouldn't let me live it down. has your lifestyle been so transient that you've never gotten too attached to another woman and your wife has suffered from it? i see it literally every day, have been victim to it, have taken advantage of it, and have arrived at the conclusion that it pretty much amounts to things that suck more often than not. i've seen it lead to divorces and re-marriages that tend not to work out (two people emotionally cheating on their spouses only need have sex a lot of times to turn that into 'love'). it's usually a case where the wronged person gets a phone call from their ex saying, 'babe, i screwed up big-time. i'm sorry. is there any chance we can patch things up?' rest assured, it's there.

(correction: in some post, i made reference to dashel (sp), for some reason having it stuck in my mind his first name was tom. i meant dashiell (sp) hammet. it doesn't belong in this thread, but....)

Characters

To be honest, I think all this is being way the heck over-analyzed. I also don't believe any of the scenarios here fit more than a fraction of writers. People are different. Different talents, different skills, different abilities, and this includes the ability to judge others. It also means then ten people who react exactly the same way to a given situation will likely have ten very different reasons for doing so.

Some of us write about things we've never done and never will do, and some of us write about things we have done many times. Some writers lack the life experience to be able to judge others in any way except psycho-babble, and some writers have spent much of their lives in situations where you either judge quickly and accurately or you die.

Some writers see what another person does, how they react, and ascribe their own reasons and beliefs to those actions and reactions. Others understand that you usually can't do this in real life.

You can't judge people, you can't anything people. You can only jduge individuals, and you can only know individuals, and even when you get the emotions and actions right, you may still be wrong about the motivations.

The old "Write what you know" applies as strongly to characters as to subject matter. It's usually pretty easy to tell when a writer is making it all up, and when he really knows somethign about the characters he's writing about.

As for character actions, peole sometimes do stupid things, and so should characters. But they should also pay for those actions. It's easy to say, "Well, this character wouldn't have taken this action because he has some trauma, or he's a pacifist, or his mom wouldn't let him wrestle with his brother."

This does happen in the real world. The difference is, in the real world such people get stepped on. In bad fiction, they go on to win the day.

The trouble with character actions in far too many manuscripts, and in some published novels, is that the characters only act as they do because if they did anything else the plot wouldn't work. That's bad writing, and worse storytelling.

It isn't always saying something a character does is stupid because you wouldn't do it that way. Often it's because something the character does really is stupid, unrealistic, and no sane person would react that way, and the only reason the character does is because the writer has a plot that will only work if the character acts like an idiot.

It's like the blond in the horror movie who goes down into the basement after hearing some monstrous sound, and usually after three other people have been brutally murdered. Yeah, right. That's going to happen. And if a person really were that stupid, wouldn't you root for the monster?

Took some subterfuge

Writing Again said:

Not to mention the gal I know who kept a tattoo on her thigh secret from her husband for two years.

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Now that's got to be a strange romantic relationship. My conjugal girlfriends and I have known each square millimeter of our bodies, and I don't think that's an unusual aspect of a romantic relationship. But for 2 years? Jeez Louise

Did she keep him "in the dark"? ha ha

Originally Posted by Writing Again
Not to mention the gal I know who kept a tattoo on her thigh secret from her husband for two years.

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Hmmm...maybe the husband just wasn't ...uhmm...looking there.

Ahem.



Mike

This blog is so "spot on" that I might just frame it. It's perfect. Absolutely perfect.

http://artfulwriter.com/
Writers - Please Stop The New Age Mumbo Jumbo

My third novel came about quite by accident. While researching San Francisco history, for a sequel to my second novel, something strange happenen to an acquaintance. The acquaintance moved away and later I moved away so I never heard the conclusion of her story. But, it haunted me and I began imagining all sorts of reasons for her "strangeness" and all sorts of scenarios for what she did about it. Hence, the SF research was dropped and I moved from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, dropped third person, past tense, omniscient and picked up first person, present tense.

This is what I like best about writing -- the spontaneity of it, the "where in the world did that come from?" when I click on "save."

Because of the scenario I chose, my protagonist picked my other characters -- a boyfriend, her two best girl friends and the catalyst for her strangeness. To me, this is art, creation, playing God. Of course it goes hand-in-hand with a learned ability to write right.

I can't write when I have to force characters into my head.

Artful Writer: I read your blog. Quite intellectual and above me. Why do you call yourself "Artful" when you state that (your) writing is "intellectual?" (Hard work, study, etc.) Art and writing come from the same side of the brain. Case in point, my husband. He's a scientist and when he's in his zone he is not creative. When he has a a moment of awe, it doesn't bring him to tears. However he's also an artist and writer and I've seen him shead tears over the sheer impact of his finished canvases and emotionally written scenes. Most good writers are artful (creative.) Or do I misunderstand your defination of the word?

I am a firm believer that there's more to our minds than they let us know; why else do we surprise ourselves so often?

The strangest thing for me about creating characters is that I don't really have to create. It's more like putting puzzle pieces together out of my own experience and subconscious.

When I read a friend's piece, and they tell me that they don't know where that character came from - because it's nothing like them - I instantly begin to analyze the character's existence. Most well-developed characters are reflections of the author. Even if the character does something strange that the author would never do - like free-falling - this is just the author's way of expressing both their fear of free-falling, and their secret desire that they could be brave enough to do it.

But - I say *most* well-developed characters, and I say this for a reason. This rule seems to break down when it encounters evil characters. This time, however, the author uses the character to comment on things that the author considers taboo or worse.

Good/main characters let us experience things we are scared of, let us expose our subconscious to the world. Evil characters allow us to comment on the darker side of nature and our own personal fears.

People ask where ideas and characters come from. The answer is that they are very much the products of the writer's subconscious, even if the writer doesn't know it.

black winged fighter said:

Good/main characters let us experience things we are scared of, let us expose our subconscious to the world. Evil characters allow us to comment on the darker side of nature and our own personal fears.

People ask where ideas and characters come from. The answer is that they are very much the products of the writer's subconscious, even if the writer doesn't know it.

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This may be true for the reader, some readers, but not necessarily for all readers and all writers.

I hate such phrases as "even if the writer doesn't know it." I'm sure some of my characters come from my subconscious, but I know for a fact that a great many don't. I know exactly where they come from. They're real people I've known, loved or hated, sometimes fought against or beside, and very, very often they're pople who spent an awful bunch of hours in desperate times spilling their guts to me, just as I did to them.

It's extremely rare for me to make up a character from whole cloth, or to sit and dream one up.