Characters and Why I Love Them

On Monday I talked about where my ideas come from. Today I'm going to talk about where my characters come from.

One of my favorite authors, Tamora Pierce, talks about her characters on her website. She takes portions of people around her and bases characters on them. Other times she bases her characters on pictures of random people she collects.

I take a similar approach to creating characters. Most of my MCs start out as some reflection of myself (something you might quickly notice if you get to read more than one of my stories). Actually Alana, the MC of my WIP was me when I started writing the story as a teenager. Writing was a chance to take myself of crazy adventures I would never actually get to do in real life. As I've worked on the piece, Alana has become her own person, but there are still distinct pieces of me in her. Aspects of her personality, likes and dislikes, and even how she looks are taken largely from my own life. How are we the same? We both like to read; we both love horses; we both have a sarcastic streak. How are we different? She has an easier time speaking her mind than I do; she goes to public school; she's an only child; her parents are divorced; and most importantly, she is a mage. There's lots of other similarities (our hair color) and differences (she took riding lessons as a kid).

What about my other characters? My male MCs or supporting characters. Where do they come from? Well, as far as MCs go, I usually find some way to (at least at first) base them on a guy I know. When I was a teen it would be the guy I had a crush on. As I got older, they transformed from a single guy I knew to a more general male figure. I have to say that my male MCs are somewhat more varied than they used to be.

As for supporting characters, those are usually just people who pop up when needed. I need a best friend for an MC and suddenly I see the perfect person. There are two best friends for Alana in my WIP (well actually three.) One of them is actually based on my brother to a point, but only slightly. The other, the girl, is completely made up. I realized Alana needed a female friend and she just presented herself to me, fully formed. The same with the third friend. I needed a character to perform a particular part and this character just stepped up, ready to be put into action. That's how most of my supporting characters are. They seem to show up where I need them in the exact form that I need them to take. It's like they're real people raising their hand and saying, "Over here. I'm the one you need." And surprisingly they are a pretty varied group.

Names are another thing altogether though. They are probably the hardest thing for me to come up with for a character. My MC was pretty easy. It was her name that gave me the idea for the story in the first place, but it took me quite a while to come up with names for the rest of the cast.

I have found that it seems a little easier to make up a name for a character in my fantasy world than it is to find the right name for characters in my "real life" stories. Making up names seems second nature to me, perhaps because I've been doing it for most of my life. My brother and I would make up whole worlds, and I came up with the various names for the races and people we created. So coming up with the perfect fantasy name is usually pretty straightforward. When I have to look up names for my non-fantasy characters (and some of the fantasy ones too) it gets harder.

See I'm a little obsessed with names. I own ten or more baby name books and have for years. My friends thought I was crazy. So did my family. The reason I have the name book is because I'm also obsessed with name meanings. If I'm going to use a name, it needs to really mean something and that meaning usually relates to my story somehow. I have used names for the way they sound before, but not often. One example of that rare occasion is when I needed names for five sisters. I chose names that went well together and fit the girls' personalities more than anything else.

So that's my character creation process. Sometimes it starts with a name. Other times it starts with a need. On occasion it starts with a physical description. But in the end, they all turn into the characters that are just right for their stories.