Creating characters and autobiography (quotes)

I started my "free writing courses online" -project with the course "Start writing fiction" from the Open University. You can see all my posts regarding this course here. This is Part 1.5 B-


This is from the 1.3 Part that is called "Sources of characters". In the previous post I summarized the audios. But it might benefit you more to read the quotes.


So, these are the comments I liked the most of the first audio file, where the topic was how they have used autobiography in fiction:




Abdulrazak Gurnah:

"I don’t -- expect that you can -- escape writing about your experiences, or if you do then in itself that becomes a kind of project."


"-- I still believe that in fact it is actually harder to keep the writer out of the writing than people imagine --."

Michele Roberts:

"-- if you just write about yourself, you’re too close to -- your own stuff, you can’t see it properly. So normally you end up repressing, writing -- clumsily, and you need to open up to the world and throw your own stuff out into the world and find -- an objective correlative."

Monique Roffey:

"-- August [her character] isn’t that different in terms of his cultural background and his age [from herself]. -- I think if he was a young boy who lived in China, though, I would have had to have made a much bigger creative leap. -- I knew what he was about, really, so it was very easy to make the switch."

Alex Garland:

"-- [What] first-time writers often -- end up doing is they draw a lot on themselves to flesh out the character. -- you could do it and then you could drop in a few things that he would do that you wouldn’t do, and suddenly you’ve got a fictional character who will take you in different directions."

These are the comments I liked the most of the second audio file, where the topic was how they create their characers:



Monique Roffey:

"I think it’s very much a mixture of accident and design. -- they tend to kind of morph, -- to -- mix. -- But once that’s happened I -- treat it in a research-like, a sort of scholarly way. -- I know everything about that character by the time I’ve worked on it. So I use both, I use conscious and the unconscious to -- make someone."

Louis de Bernie`res:

"There’s the type that just turns up at your shoulder like a ghost and insists on being written. -- The other kind -- you invent more or less from scratch or create as a composite of various people that you’ve noticed -- as soon as the character begins to become real, -- they don’t do what you tell them to do. You often find yourself altering the story to accommodate your characters."

Alex Garland:

"-- often what I did was a kind of cheap trick in a way, which was you pin a particular characteristic on a character. -- Yeah, you find a little peg to hang them on and leave them on it."