What inspires your characters?
By Aquilis
@Aquilis (175)
March 30, 2009 9:49pm CST
When you look to create a new character for a story, where do you look for your inspiration? Do you prefer life references over fictional works, do your characters have a basis on people you know, or do you prefer to gain glimpses of total strangers and expand from that?
Thanks in advance for your replies :)
2 responses
@snowy22315 (181971)
• United States
31 Mar 09
I dont write fiction, but if I did I would use an amalgam of people from my own life and use them as my characters for the story. I think that would be the best way to go in terms of creating characters for fictional characters. It would be very important to be able to use those characters and making them true to life very interesting.
@xParanoiax (6987)
• United States
31 Mar 09
My characters are usually built on some basic principle inspired by the plot. Sometimes I'll create them because I want to explore a specific archetype, or personality type, or quirk...and I build it all on from there depending on what strikes as most fitting and good.
Occasionally I do base it off someone I know. What's funny is, the most common question I get asked about my characters is; "Are they based on you?"
My stories are an expression of where my head's at, I don't need to base my characters off myself. Parts of them may echo of small things about me, usually I do that on purpose to be funny, but overall most them couldn't be more different.
