Characters are Everywhere

Hi, friends!

Thank you all so much for sticking with me, even as we go down to having two posts a week, instead of three. If you can’t get enough of me, don’t forget that I will be the normal writer of the RADblog on Fridays. I’ll do my best to share that link on my Facebook page as well, whenever we post, so you’ll be able to keep in touch.

This month, we’re talking about what it really means to be a writer. On Tuesday I focused on seeing plots everywhere, on not being able to get out of that zone, no matter where we go or what we do—and today’s topic is along a very similar line. Unlike Tuesday, however, I’m going to make it a little more personal.

Writers never stop assessing people… as characters.

We really don’t. Some of us do try to see people in a different light, to not be so stuck in the rut of seeing anyone and everyone around us as a character in a story, a small part of a larger whole, but really, we just can’t stop. After all, this is the thing that we do whenever we get the chance. Whether writing is our day job or not, it’s something that we live in, something we associate with, something that we are, and that we do.

We’re writers, and we write people.

Like you.

Which is where today’s topic comes in.

See, I’ve written a lot of characters, based on my assessments of people in the real world. Bear in mind though, that I’ve never really talked to those people to make sure they were okay with me making them into a character. Why? Because I didn’t really make them into a character. I took some features of theirs, some things that they said or did, and morphed them with a plethora of other ideas to make a fully-fledged character. Nothing wrong with that, after all.

Let’s talk about a few though, shall we? (don’t worry, I won’t say anybody’s real name, and nothing here will even be able to reveal who you are)

Friends

I have this one friend who knows everything. Seriously. He knows everything. So I used that little detail about him, that really funny and really brilliant side of him, to make a character. Because see, it’s hard to make a character like that and make him realistic, since it’s so rare to meet a person like that. So, since I knew someone, I used that feature about them to make my character more real, more vivid, more lifelike. But, my friend is a little awkward, and I needed someone a little more hands-on. So I used that one detail, but built off it to make something else.

Family

There’s this one family member of mine, who’s the sweetest person in the whole wide world. I’m sure we all know at least one of those. Well, I’ve used her as a basis for some of the witches in the Druid Novels. They were designed to be sweet and innocent, which this family member definitely is. But I don’t have much experience in that arena, so I used her as a springboard off which to create my character. And let me tell you, it’s worked out really well.

Innocent bystanders

One day, I was walking through Sprouts here in town, and ran into a guy. Never seen him before, never seen him since. But he had this amazing walk. There was a little bit of a limp to it, a little bit of a lilt, but not enough that you’d notice it if you weren’t paying attention. And that struck me. It was the tiniest detail, if you looked at the guy. Trust me. But it was the one that I knew I could use. What if there was a character who’d been tasered in the foot when she was a child, and the feeling never fully came back? What if that made her walk differently, but she tried her best to hide it from everyone around her? That, is a great character idea, wouldn’t you say? 

We never stop doing it, no matter what. We can't. We're always looking for ways to enrich our characters. And really, it's a heck of a lot of fun. 

[love]

{RD}