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I spent a lot of time on the first draft of the novel I’m working on stymied because I was wondering about how much research I needed to do to write about things I didn’t know about. I was letting my lack of expertise rein in my writing. It was only when I remembered that fiction writing is about making things up that I threw off those reins and then let my imagination fly.
However, I still needed to rely on my experiences of life and of other people to help inform my characterizations. I needed my characters to have depth and motivation. My dialogue needed to feel real and anchored to life. So, of course, I used observations of the world around me to help inform these characters.
I often joke with my husband that one character is him, but it really isn’t. And it really isn’t. I have used just as many of my own character traits and reactions to infuse parts of that particular character. I have taken psychologies that I have witnessed around me and in the books I read, the news stories I see, and the movies I watch and amplified them by a hundred to attach to another character. It’s kind of like those old 1980s Hasbro Fashion Plates toys where you mix and match sketch plates for tops, bottoms, tights, and shoes to come up with a single (not always so cohesive) look.
One character might have the tendency to obsess over a hobby of the month, like I do, mixed in with a weekend booze habit of some soap opera character, with just a splash of introversion from my mom. I’ve had a ton of fun taking all of these traits and using them as my character building blocks and then going through on my revisions and smoothing out the stitched-together edges so that the person reads as a coherent whole. Someone that would exist in a real, if heighted, world and that has deep motivations for the actions that they’re taking.
What I haven’t done, and what you shouldn’t do (or be very careful if you do), is to have a character based off of one recognizable person that I know. My characters aren’t similar to people I know because they are entirely made up and the result of years of my imagination absorbing the world (real and fictional) around me. And creating these entirely new people is one of the best parts of writing fiction I’ve found.
It’s been fun doing the same thing for the settings in my novel. It’s not a purely realistic novel. It has touches of magic and the occult, so I have felt free to take a setting that I may have seen in my own life and pump it up by several notches. If I’m writing about a library nook, it’s going to be the most wonderful and coziest nook I’ve ever seen. One that would never exist in real life, but one that has all of the aspects of the different libraries that I’ve gone to and put them all together into one beautiful composite.
This act of creation has been thrilling. Watching these characters and these worlds build up bit by bit as the words flow from my mind to the digital page has been energizing and inspiring. This is the very best part of writing. It’s why I can’t understand why tech bros are pushing AI for creative work. This. This act of creation is the very best part of writing. I would never in a million years give it up. It is based off of what I know. I take what I know and stretch the boundaries, pushing and pulling and shaping and creating until it’s become this amazing multi-colored cloth that is recognizable but also magical and unique and new.
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