Sep 30 2008
Writing Tip of the Day: Try Not to Base Your Characters on Real-Life Models
Generally, characters that are based on the friends and family members of the author turn out poorly.
- These characters tend to be boring because they lack flaws. If your character is based on a friend or family member, you might feel afraid to give that character any flaws, because your friend might find out.
- It may limit the character’s development if you feel that you have to be “true” to the real-life model. Generally, it’s easiest to write when you completely own the material.
- Your friend or family member might not fit into the story. Well-constructed characters will have traits, flaws, skills, emotions and conflicts carefully tailored to the story. But a bad character may have details that just don’t work. For example, Soon I Will Be Invincible inexplicably tried to fit several adult superheroes into a conflict between geeks and jocks. If it seems strange that adults would really care about who was popular back in high school, it seems absolutely mind-blowing that a mutant tiger would refer to something as “geek stuff.”
- Your friends and family are probably not quite as interesting or endearing to readers as they are to you. Why will we care about your friends?
It’s important to build distance between you and your characters, but you can still use your real-life observations to make your book feel more realistic. For example, instead of modeling characters on your friends and family, you might draw on certain traits or habits from them. It’s easier to adapt a habit or characteristic for your book than it is it to transplant a character wholesale.
Oh, than I’m okay….
Both Pierce and Connor are loosely based on people I know.
- Wings
This one story I started writing a few months ago didn’t work out, but not because of the character based on my best friend. In fact, she ended up being the coolest character in the story, and she was almost exactly like her personality wise and other things.
Of course I didn’t put in her obsession with HSM because it was a fantasy setting, but most of her was there.
She was almost the main character because the main character … the main character had almost no personality. My friend has a ton.
For me, luckily basing characters on my friends went out with Mary Sues. Well, mostly. Some of my characters, I look at them and say ‘he has my brother’s shyness, my friend’s smarts, my dad’s seriousness…’ and so on. Or a small habit is shared. (My brother’s walk is a run, my brother’s run is a sprint, which translated into one of my characters being a *very* fast walker.)
A writer friend of mine would definitely benefit from this article. But I know he’s not going to read it. -_- He’s very touchy about his writing.
I am basing a character on my sister. She is actually an archenemy of the heroine, Hawkfire.
A few questions. First, does your sister (or the model based on the sister) fit into the story? Second, would people want to read about your sister as a supervillain? Third, why not just make a new character? It might be easier to give the character more depth and (ironically) more verisimilitude that way.
Two of my characters (Connor and Pierce) started out as blatant self inserts of my brother and P (Pierce, appearance if not personality wise, still is. We’re working on it).
However, they went in drastically different directions as production went on (See Ian for the biggest personality change probably in all history of the books. Darren and Pierce to a lesser extent).
Self inserts can be done right, but you’ve got to be extremely careful (Twilight was just Stephenie Meyer’s wish-fulfillment fantasy with herself as the main character written down).
- Wings
Twilight was definitely a self-insert of Stephenie Meyer. But if anyone attempted to analyze the text, it seems like Bella has no discernable traits that make her compatible with Edward, nothing prevalent that would seem like a huge character flaw. That’s probably why it sells like crazy, because it’s like a “choose your adventure” book for fanfiction writing teens! They can easily imagine themselves in place of Bella in the story, because it was compatible to almost every fan of the book. At least, that’s my theory.
Self inserts can be done well, but it depends on the expertise of the writer. For example, some manga artists use a self-insert in the story, but they are rarely the main character (Kakashi Hatake as Masashi Kishimoto from Naruto). Kakashi was the main character’s mentor, he was there to guide him and to teach him to become stronger, but in the end it is the main character that drives the plot forward with his decisions, not based on what Kakashi would’ve done instead.
Gary/Agent Black is probably a self-insert–for one thing, he looks almost exactly like me. As a result, I try to play up how bumbling and naive he is… I’m going for a Jon Arbuckle rather than a super-smart, super-collected Dan Brown protagonist.
When Stephenie Meyer did her cameo in the Twilight movie, it was ASTONISHING how much she looked like a less attractive version of Bella.
“Bella has no discernable traits that make her compatible with Edward…” What do you think about this? She’s sort of weak and useless. She doesn’t really do much of anything on her own and goes to pieces when Edward leaves. She’s virtually unable to function on her own, so it sort of makes sense that she would gravitate towards an (abusively) assertive boyfriend. I don’t think that’s the message Meyer intended, though.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Meyer hates nice, normal guys. In the second movie, Bella knows three nice guys: her (allegedly) dorky father, a flamingly effeminate Asian guy, and a scrawny dude that can’t even sit through an action movie without throwing up.
It’s because all girls want bad boys…
Eh. ‘Bad boys’ are great for movies and everything but ‘in real life’ it just wouldn’t work … my dad wouldn’t approve, my brothers would beat the crap out of him, and that’d be the end of it.
Besides, well, ‘good boys’ are so much better. ^^