Chase Your Character Up a Tree and Throw Rocks at Them

There are a couple of questions that I have gotten asked a lot since my book came out. “What's wrong with you?” certainly comes to mind.

Anyway, apart from that there's one question/comment that I hear a lot:

“Did you/will you base a character off of me?” or “I think I know which character you based off of me.”

Now, to be fair, this is no one's fault but my own. In my first post I talked about how the protagonist of my book was essentially me, but in breeches and tallboots. Well, it shouldn't be a surprise that an author who writes herself into her world is also going to write people that she knows into her book.

I think it harkened back in my days of writing fanfiction with friends. When I was in high school, especially my freshman year, one of my best friends was really into fanfiction. We started working on one together for the Redwall series by the much-missed Brian Jacques. We had this huge outline and all our friends were in it. It was a lot of fun to go to people and show them a scene or a character bio and watch them react when they realized that they were, in fact, one of Log-a-Log's shrews or a fearsome badger. I think I was a squirrel. We did end up getting distracted and ended up abandoning the project, which was ultimately for the best.

However, for a long time when I was working on my own original characters I followed the same pattern. So, the first draft of the EBR featured not only a self-insert Mary Sue, but also a number of supporting Sues and Stus, all based on people that I knew.

:shudders:

I promise I'm not exaggerating, dear reader; it was bad.

Thankfully, as I worked I started to run into some problems. Strangely enough, I wasn't afraid to torture my self-insert. I put that poor creature through hell. Unfortunately, I dealt with it by making her “practically perfect in every way”, although if I'm honest you should probably go ahead and remove the “practically”. But the problem was...I found it incredibly hard to treat my characters as I needed to when they were closely based on people that I know.

The title of this post is a much-loved axiom in the writing community and for good reason. How can you have an interesting story if you aren't willing to put your character through anything? Would Harry Potter have been half as interesting if Harry hadn't been flawed and put through the ringer? Would we have cared about him so much if we hadn't been with him through his lowest moments? Or, my fellow Supernatural fans, how much are the Winchester boys tortured in-universe? Talk about sending your characters to Hell and back. Any Joss Whedon fans out there? There's a reason that the man's name is now linked to a trope that is often used to reference “gutwrenching main character death”.

In other words...characters have to suffer. Literature has often been a way for humanity to come to terms with the often brutal nature of the world that we live in. That is part of why some of the most enduring stories aren't the ones that pretend that the world is all sunshine and rainbows, they are the ones where characters are dealt the shit-end of the stick and manage to make it work.

As a reader, I can usually tell when an author is pulling punches. It yanks me out of a story when a character should suffer some consequence for their behavior and they don't. If they are someone who treats everyone around them terribly, then I don't want to see everyone around them sing their praises. I don't want to see a character make stupid decision upon stupid decision and get rewarded for it. If a character screws up they should have to deal with it.

Those things are what make writing about people one knows and cares about almost as dangerous as writing about oneself. How can you possibly be open to anything happening to your characters if you are trying to protect them for the sake of the people they are based off of?

This post is pretty much the long way of saying that I don't want to “throw rocks” at people I care about, but I do want to throw them (hard) at my characters. If I write someone I know into anything I am working on I know that I am going to be inclined to make that character's life easier. And there's a flipside to that too. I don't want to write about someone I know who I am inclined to throw rocks at.

I am not a perfect person. I am not universally liked and I make no pretense of liking everyone. There are people who I have not had good relationships with. I don't really want to be the author who is obviously attacking those mean cheerleaders from high school.

Writing people you know into your work is of course your prerogative. It is your story. I just wanted to talk a little bit about why I got away from it. That's not to say that there's nothing in common between my characters and people in my life, but I no longer base a character directly off anyone I know and I hope this post explains some of why. If I am worrying about protecting characters or managing the feelings of the people who might recognize themselves in my work then I am not working towards writing the best story I can. The characters and the world need to work together. As much fun as it would be to bring my dear friends and family into the worlds that have come to mean so much to me...it's probably for the best that they stay out. I hear the creator of those worlds is a bitch.