Characters Taken from Real Life

Being true to life is a principle that will spark some of your most original writing. As in any field, nothing beats hands-on experience for knowing the nuances of how a relationship or a plot event evolved. Yet adhering to real life does not work so well in the larger scheme of a novel. Life has so many nuances that you could write a thousand pages about a single week. The process of writing a novel leads almost immediately to compression. You need to relate just the interesting stuff. The compressed nature of a novel in turn shapes its characters into exaggerated, larger-than-life figures. True to life, yes, but within a novel’s inherent distortions of life. 

Trying to write from experience causes a common failing among novice writers: not separating their characters from their real-life models. People you know can be extremely limiting when building a novel. You need the freedom to discover where a character wants to take a plot thread. When the character is your sister, however, she will bend your plot to go in the direction that you know she would demand. That may be fine in some instances, but you can see the problem. The character has placed shackles on your imagination. You’re on the outside looking in at that other person, not inhabiting the character from the inside out. In many cases, an even worse outcome ensues. Your sister, because what she wants is so realistic, makes your novel ordinary. You come back a few days later to a piece of dialogue you’ve written and think, “OMG, this is so terrible. Even my sister is more interesting that this!”

You can use both approaches. Before you start the novel, write a character sketch that includes the realistic attributes you want a character to have. But once you start writing, listen to what the character wants. Let your fingers do the walking until you see where the next scene ends up. What frees a good character of his shackles is when he goes where he wants to go—not because that is what the real-life model would do, but because he is reacting to the events inside your book. 

Exercise: Pick a character and track how she is developing in any scene. When she talks, are you thinking of a specific person in your life? If so, dig deeper. What point has the character’s developmental arc reached at that point? What should she be doing for the plot at that point? Immerse yourself in what your fictional situation calls for, and pretty soon you’ll find that she is telling you what she wants.  She has become a player in your drama.

“The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.” —Umberto Eco