Characters coming to life

I read another blog this morning about whether or not you should base characters on real people and it set me off thinking.  The characters in the novel I am writing started life based not on real people but on their online personas.  But saying that they are not the people themselves.  They were starting points.  At some point the characters took on a life of their own.  The bad guy started based on a friend being a bit of a bad boy and loose cannon in a game but would he ever rape and pillage in real life, of course not.  I will admit a few of the names are there in honour of some of the people who are supporting me, cheering me along and giving me confidence when I feel I am losing my way.

I guess we always use our own experiences as starting points.  If you have never been in love could you write about it….well maybe but it would be a different type of love.  As a teenager before real boys ever entered my thoughts I was in love with John Taylor, bass player for Duran Duran.  If anyone had dared to suggest that was not real love I would have screamed blue murder at them.  And in a way it was a type of love, Love in its purest form not confused by lust or any of the messy emotions that come along as you grow up, even if totally unrequited (although secretly I still live in hope). The point is every experience we have shapes how we view things.  So surely the same is true of all the people we meet.

I would probably never base a character on just one person, it is more of a pick and mix, one trait from one person  another from another.  I am sure that if my friend were like my bad guy he would have been removed and blocked from my friends list.  I also have to say that writing the bad guy is much more fun at times than writing the good guys.  It allows you to explore areas that you would never ever venture in other circumstances.  On the other hand I find i have to becareful it would be so easy for my bad guy to simply be that just a bad guy but he is more than that.  I want to explore why he is the bad guy, whether he could have ever been anything else.  Maybe it seems strange I am writing a fantasy after all so why does it matter why he is bad.  Well I guess for me it is the way he becomes what he is that makes him more real.

Sometimes while I am away from the computer parts of the story run through my head.  It happened the other day I was day dreaming and it was almost like evesdropping on a conversation between two of my characters, and I found myself discovering things I hadn’t planned.  Possible new plot twists appeared based on the new things I was learning about my characters.

Now I know this is only my first novel, so the way I see things now may be very different to how I will see them in the future.  I may look back in a few years time and mock my own thoughts, but I can only comment based on how I think right now.