Where does the inspiration for your characters come from?

A lot of my main characters are women, and I base them off of what I'm like, or what I would like to be, or what I think more women should be like...I think it's safe to say that the kind I write about break the mold that you see in other examples of the multimedia because, let's forget those crappy movies where the women are either A. the on-the-side girlfriend of the main guy/hero who really serves no purpose other than stand around and look hot for him, or B. the sooooo mature, uppity can't-do-anything-that-looks-fun-because-it's-childish-and-immature women who once again their only purpose is to stand in the corner and look pretty. And their lives will ABSOLUTELY be over if they don't get married soon.

Now, putting these from the movies aside, you have women in literature, and from what I've seen of a lot of novels that are still coming out about women, it doesn't seem much different in the literary world either. Still a lot of them about women finding the right guy and falling in love and having a big fancy wedding, funny you never see such a story with a guy in the main role. And if it's not that, it's about the woman who is so haunted by her past because she was abused and she spends the entire book putting her life together and trying to overcome what she's been through.

But my characters, they're like me, they couldn't care less about crap like that, they want action, they want the front line, and they don't focus on 'oh poor me, I'm so traumatized', their attitude is more like 'yeah I've been through this shit, I survived and I'm still here so I'm going to enjoy my life'; and they're more realistic, it's not like in the movies 'oh look at me, I'm so hot and I'm such an expert in martial arts like I've been training since the moment I was born' or whatever. I honestly think the literary and film industries could benefit from more female characters like that, instead of what they keep giving us.

I write non-fiction, so my characters are real person or combinations of real people.

@Super: That's interesting. More power to ya!

My characters typically are collages of a lot of things. Sometimes I just make them up, others are hopes or fears or wishes manifested into a "person." Some are needed to complete another character. I usually "cast" mine to give them some identities. But I think my characters really become MY characters when I put myself into them and so I see my characters as a partial reflection of me.

My characters are derived from the following sources:


1. People I have met and associated with
2. Different facets of my own personality
3. People I have read about or watched in films
4. An amalgamation of a little from each.
5. Exagerration of human personality traits.

Knowledge of human motives which generate the emotions of envy, hatred, love, compassion, pity, righteous indignation, is very helpful as is the quality of life one is living or has lived which can provide a storehouse of material from which a unique character can be derived.

I normally wrote about people whom I know. Then, I develop their characters so that they fit to the stories. The characters are my children, I have to be able to love them, even when I was writing about cheaters, rapists or liars. Therefore, they have to be real, so real that I could almost touch them.

rienpoet wrote:

I normally wrote about people whom I know. Then, I develop their characters so that they fit to the stories. The characters are my children, I have to be able to love them, even when I was writing about cheaters, rapists or liars. Therefore, they have to be real, so real that I could almost touch them.

I totally agree. If you don't feel totally connected to them, how can you expect your reader to?