Short answer: caffeine and neuroses!

How much are your characters an extension of yourself?

This is a longer spectrum than one might think. At first blush, it might seem binary: either a character is based on you, or s/he isn’t. If s/he is, there’s a chance s/he’s the dreaded Mary Sue: a character who is 100% you (or what you wish you could be). Mary Sue tends to crop up in fanfiction, and is generally disliked. Why? Because when an author puts themselves in a work of fiction, they usually can’t help make it a masturbatory quest of wish fulfillment.

One of the most famous examples of a Mary Sue is Wesley Crusher from Star Trek. Wesley Crusher was pretty much Star Trek creator Gene Wesley Roddenberry imagining himself as a young lad in the Federation. A genius lad. A genius lad who makes friends with the Captain, saves the day on multiple occasions, and essentially becomes a starship crewman without ever having gone to Starfleet Academy and earning it like everyone around him. And it didn’t help that he wore embarrassing sweaters and whined all the time. Guess whom all the fans hated?

So to avoid Mary Sue and all the bad connotations, you might shy away from letting your characters have anything to do with you- which might be doing them a disservice. If they have absolutely nothing in common with you, you may have a hard time reaching inside and grabbing something to bring them to life on the page.

As a person, you’ve lived a certain number of years and done certain things. You have a unique set of skills and experience that you can describe and portray and own the way no one else can. Imbuing characters with your own traits and experience, in tiny doses, can help make your characters more real- and make you more confident in portraying them.

Lived through something dramatic? Why not incorporate that somewhere? Have funny quirks? Imbue them on a character who needs a little something to stand out on the page.

A character might have the same job as you, or have the same number of siblings you do, or like the same food or wear the same stuff. They might tell the same story of how someone winged an icy snowball at them once, which gave them a cut down the length of their face (happened to me!) I’m not afraid to make computer-savvy characters, because I know that lingo. I’m not afraid to make fighters either, ’cause I’m a martial artist.

Granted, different genres give you different degrees of freedom with this. A sci-fi alien isn’t supposed to have anything in common with you, puny human- but the starship crew trying to get along with that alien might.

If you need ideas to connect with or flesh out a character, it may be easiest to look inward first.

What personal traits or experiences have you bestowed upon your characters? Do you find this approach helps you relate to your characters better? Drop me a line and let me know!