Are you your characters?
A fiction writer creates characters, so this is a natural question to ask such an author. I guess my answer if asked it would be ambivalent: Maybe.
Probably every author puts a bit of themselves into some characters they create, but most authors are observers of human nature and are more likely to use what they see and hear into their characters. (Observations of ETs are a bit more difficult, but they might have some human-like characteristics.)
A secondary but related question is: Which of your characters do you identify with? That has an obvious answer if an author has cameo appearances in his prose. (I have several, most of them as an owner of a bookstore.) But the answer might also suggest what kind of person an author might want to be or become.
Readers often ask these questions at book events or in a lecture’s Q & A session at the end. (I regret that the video of my presentation of Rembrandt’s Angel available on YouTube doesn’t contain the lively Q & A session corresponding to that lecture.)
My answers to all these questions has become more complicated over time: My novels are complex, and each one has many characters. Maybe the better question to direct to me is: How do I make every character distinct? It’s more of a challenge now.
I struggled with Steve Morgan in the new “Trilogy of Evil” that my new work-in-progress. (Legacy of Evil, the first novel in that trilogy, has already been published.) Inspector Morgan has a similar background to NYPD homicide detective Castilblanco of the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series, not because I identify with that background but because Castilblanco has many admirable qualities (and a few flaws). A lot of Morgan’s similarity was unconscious creation, believe me. Castilblanco is to author Moore like Bosch is to author Connelly. Only in my case, in order to avoid becoming formulaic, I decided to move on to a new detective, Steve Morgan. Castilblanco and Morgan are variations on a theme, though, and I admire them both. I hope you do too.
But Castilblanco and Morgan are only two of my many characters. What about the others? In particular, what about the female characters? Can a male author create a believable female character with traits he can admire, and vice versa? I would respond with an emphatic yes! Again, the male author has to be an observer of females’ behavior, and vice versa. Human nature is comprised of both a fortiori, so observing human nature involves both. There are elements of behavior common to both sexes, and there are differences, so a good author observes the commonalities and differences to get the full picture. I’ve even been so bold as to create a female main character and write in the first person! I felt up to this challenge because I’ve observed a lot of strong and clever women whom I can admire, a lot more than just my mother who was one.
The bottom line here is that if authors aren’t good observers of human nature, they cannot create realistic characters. The author is only one person to use in their analysis; a larger statistical set of human beings is necessary. That might be hard for an introverted author to manage, but it is a necessary condition for creating believable characters.
***
Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules listed on my “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, your comment is classified as spam.)
The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This special 99-cent sale at Smashwords is better than my previous ones! This ebook bundle contains three novels: Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! You start your mind-blowing journey on a future Earth run by international mega-corporations and policed by their mercenaries, but a clever director of the interplanetary space agency refurbishes three long-haul space rigs and uses them to send colonists off to nearby stars. Those colonies become the salvation for humanity as human beings team up with good ETs to battle bad ones…and a collective super-intelligence that’s a bit ambivalent as a villain. But the worst enemy, a human, is yet to come; if this is my Foundation trilogy, he’s my Mule. Spanning thousands of years of future near-Earth history, these adventures in space and time will give you hours of sci-fi mysteries and thrills.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
