Creating fictional characters

This is based on the free online writing course "Start writing fiction", this Part is called "Sources of characters" and contains an extract from a text from Josip Novakovich about the topic.

In my opinion these are the main points of Novakovich's text-extract:

Ways to create or find fictional people:

The ideal method = an intellectual creation, a character whom one has not observed and who is not oneself. One can use imagination to create this character, or base in for example on psychology or mythology or the Bible. 

The autobiographical method = projecting (parts of) oneself into the fictional characters you are creating

The biographical method = useing people one has observed or researched as the starting points for fictional characters, often by composing their characters from traits of several people

The mixed method = combining the biographical and the ideal method

Novakovich also quotes multiple writers, for example Mel Brooks:

‘‘Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities, and have them relate to other characters living with him.’’

One ideal to strive for is a character who will come to life seemingly on his own, but not everyone aspires this, it's just one method. But according to Novakovich one will work better with the characters the more one knows them.

So how does one know his/her characters? You need to sketch them in several ways. One way may for example be a questionnaire. The answers to certain questions, for example about the background, or major struggles, might give you ideas.

With a questionare one can either support and develope an excisting plot or develope a new plot based on the character.

According to Novakovich: 

"once you know almost enough – you hardly ever know enough – about the character, test her out. Portray her."

Novakovich also emphasizes that the characters should be like real persons with real passions.

In my opinion these are the main points of the audios:

• how it is hard to try to keep the background of the writer completely out of the writing
• when you write about yourself, you can't see it properly, because you are too near. One has to use the things one knows through engraining them into the outer world
• one doesn't have to make such a creative leap if the character is somehow near to oneself
• but one can still make the character very different from oneself
• the characters are mixtures of completely imagined ones and ones that have certain characteristics in them one has noticed in other or oneself
• the importance of filling the character out in a way that they have they own mind, knowing the background
 

You can also see the quotes that I picked from the audios.

From the free online course "Start writing fiction": This 1.3 Part is called "Sources of characters".  This is, like the previous Part has a 2 and a half -page extract from a text from Josip Novakovich and it also contains two audio files (and the transcripts). On the first 4-minute one Abdulrazak Gurnah, Michele Roberts, Monique Roffey and Alex Garland talk about how they have used autobiography in fiction. In the second one Tim Pears, Monique Roffey, Alex Garland and Louis de Bernie`res talk about how they create their characters. This Part also has an exercise as a part of it.

I am going to do the exercise later.

I liked (a lot) that in this Part one could hear the opinions and experiences form multiple writers. The basic idea of this Part wasn't necessarily new to me, but it still made me think.

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.
 
Kim A. Dremreich