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."

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