Characters Based On Your Experiences

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JustJas

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It just occurred to me the other day that most of my heroines are aged around 28, which was the age I was when I met my partner...It's got me wondering if I write about women in this age group finding love because I can't imagine what it's like to be a single woman in her 30s and beyond. I'd love to write a book with an older heroine, but I just have this mental block about it.

Does anyone else have this problem writing about women who are different to yourself? Do you write characters that are close to your own experiences in terms of age/ job /background / experiences, or do you tend to write about characters who are completely different from you?
 

sunandshadow

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I tend to write an mc who ha a similar personality but is in a completely different situation (and different body). I do mostly chars under 30, but I have two over 30; one is a single parent of a teen and the other is getting divorced from an empty-nest marriage with grown children so they had to be older for it to make sense
 

BenPanced

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In my first novel, one of the MCs is a sleeker, more streamlined version of myself. In my second, two sides of the triangle are based on baristas I've crushed out on over the years and the third is a redhead version of me.
 

Silver-Midnight

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Most of characters tend be under 30. They also tend to be the same race that I am. I do share some characteristics with them though.

I don't think it's bad to have some thing in common with your characters as long as they aren't a self-insert/Mary-Sue/Gary-Stu then you should be fine.
 

Nightmelody

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My ages vary, but most of my heroines tend to have a major life incidence that makes life hard--refugee from a war, or crippled in one leg, or was poorly educated or lacks survival skills necessary for current environment. I write paranormal and scfi rom without kick-bu** heroines, and I'm certainly not kick bu**. I'm a mom and preschool teacher by day, lol. All about good manners and cutting on the line.
 

Bubastes

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I tend to write characters who are different than me. I'm 40-ish and never married, but most of my characters are in their 20s and 30s, some married, some single, with jobs and backgrounds all over the map. Interesting, I never really thought about the relationship between my characters' lives and my own life.

ETA: I eventually want to write a women's fiction novel drawing from my experiences and my friends' experiences of being late 30s+ and single, but that's a ways off.
 
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Soccer Mom

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Most of my characters are very different from me. I like to play pretend. ;)
 

little_e

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All of my main characters reflect either aspects of myself, or people I know well. The relationship between my MCs, for example, reflects the relationship between my husband and myself, because this is the relationship I know best. When I was lonely, I wrote lonely characters. When I've been happy, I've written happy characters. And a lot of friends and acquaintances have inspired other characters.

I can look back on my characters, and am happy at least to see how I've grown as a person. :)
 

L.C. Blackwell

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I give my main characters qualities I admire, which does lead to certain similarities--my male leads are gentlemen in the old sense of the word, and generally have unlimited quantities of human decency--but beyond that I write both male and female POV, with a wide variety of ages, nationalities and professions.

Of course, I also write historical fiction, not romance. At the risk of starting a derail, I'm not sure if that gives me a wider range to use or not. I think on some levels it does, particularly when writing about middle-aged/older characters as couples.

Actually, I can see this becoming a derail, so I'm going to start a separate thread for it. :)

Does genre limit your choice of main characters?
 
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Swordfish

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In my current works, my character tends to resemble me a little to much (female early 20s), but in some previous work I did write from the POV of a 28 year old male in the military. I had to do a LOT of research when writing that, and I'm not sure I would do something so different again
 
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