Where do they come from, those fascinating, complex, enigmatic-yet-familiar characters who populate our favorite fiction? Writers are always asked that; by their readers, friends and even other writers. Like much of the art we love most, the answers are as varied as the characters themselves. There’s no right way to bring them to life, and the method for their conception is as unique to the individual authors as their own writers’ voices. That’s as it should be; as it is for artists in all genres, no matter how they’ve shared in the process of learning their technique and craft. That training is what gives them the confidence to break out eventually to present their own work. That self-assurance is what helps the characters step up with their own voices, too.
Every fiction writer admits they write about themselves over and over again. And yes, everyone else we’ve ever known on any level appears in our fiction, too. No, of course they aren’t always specifically modeled after someone whose name has simply been changed, although Mark Twain certainly had a lot of success with that technique! But most of us who’ve written fiction find that we and our acquaintances sneak into our work, mostly surreptitiously. That’s fine. We write what we know and the characters are more real because of it. Yet since they’re often more of an amalgam of all the different personalities we’ve encountered, just as people themselves combine different DNA molecules to become something old and new, our characters reflect the depth of the human experience in an exciting and powerful way; but why and how?
If we accept, arbitrarily I’ll admit, that the method behind Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer’s populations represents one extreme end of the spectrum, a place where every major character is designed specifically after one of the author’s acquaintances and just given a new fictitious name (as easily as Mark Twain grew out of Sam Clemens) then where do all the other fictitious souls fall along the range of composite personalities? The simple and true answer is ‘everywhere’, from somewhat familiar and even familial, to ‘never seen you before…I don’t think’.