Is It Really You?

Readers often ask me: is the character you’ve written in this story / novel / flash fiction really, actually you?

I like to take the question as a compliment – after all, it’s readers believing in my character so convincingly that they find it hard to believe that character isn’t real. They’re too realistic to be fictional! They must be based on someone – most probably the author, ie. you!

Of course the answer is no. I try to write from experience where I can – but I haven’t done anything nearly as exciting as my characters! I’ve travelled. I’ve lived. I’ve had ups and downs, tragedies and achievements. I wanted to write novels when I was a teenager, but held off because I knew I hadn’t ‘lived’ and wanted to write from experience.

(Which is not to say that all young writers should hold off, I just thought that was the right approach for me.)

Now that I have lived, yes, I use what I’ve experienced over the years in my writing. So if my character goes through a particular experience and there’s been a moment in my life when I’ve felt a similar way, I remember back, intensify the emotion I once had, and give it to my character.

I even teach other writers how to do this in my creative writing courses, for adults, young writers and children – my writing workshop for children is even called ‘Problems in Wonderland’. The having of problems is universal. No matter how fortunate or unfortunate we may be, we all have problems and experience both sadness and happiness. Problems are relative of course, and because you never know what’s truly going on in a person’s life, I’d much rather have the problems I do than those of others – including my characters. I’m pretty mean to them! But because problems are a universal language that bonds and unites us as humans, thinking about my characters’ problems, and what they have and haven’t done about them, is my way into knowing them as people.

It’s my readers way in too – and if they suspect any character I’ve written is somehow me, I have achieved my goal! I have taken my reader on an adventure not only through an interesting experience, but through the eyes of an interesting person, a whole person – a realistic person.

Is anything real?

At least that’s one theory… Writing takes time, so writers can spend a long time with their characters. When I’m in a character’s head I try to believe what they believe, feel what they feel, and over the months surely there’s a chance that can become a part of me as an author? So do my characters become me?

Alternatively… in giving portions of my experience to my characters, are they perhaps a collective version of me? Each one might be a different part of me that really does exist, except I’m in denial. Is the life of an author more schizophrenic than we’d like to admit? Maybe my writing this is itself a character – the character of an author saying what she believes will cloak a secret she’d rather keep, that she is in fact her characters? Perhaps this is me, yet not me? Of course those sound like the words of an entertainer, and authors are entertainers of sorts. Or autobiographers – depending on what you believe is real…