In my writing class this semester, my students and I have been talking a lot about ways to create believable characters. One of our recent discussions was rooted in this quote from Emotional Structure by Peter Dunne:
Your hero should be a lot like you since his emotional truth is your emotional truth. If your hero is not like you, then stop and go back until he is.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this statement since it caused some disagreement in my class. Some authors clearly write characters who are very much like them, and some even create a reputation for themselves doing it (Jack Gantos, for example). But if all your characters are like you, don’t you run the risk of making them all blend together?
When I think back to the characters I’ve worked on in my projects, I realize that they tend to be pretty different. Jenny in the UnFairy Tale books is brave and feisty, qualities that I may only possess in tiny quantities. But she also struggles with loneliness and the desire to fit in, both emotions that I can relate to. Rachel from the The Dirt Diary is painfully shy and always doing/saying the wrong thing, something I can definitely identify with. Both of these characters embody some elements of my personality while still having plenty of their own characteristics.
For the new characters I’ve been working on, I realize the same holds true. They might not be like me overall, but there are tidbits of me in them: fears, desires, or emotions. I think that’s what helps them feel like real people, even if the context for those emotional truths is completely different from that in my own life.
As Orson Scott Card says in Characters and Viewpoint, we like characters who are like us, but we’re also bored if they’re too much like us. We like to find tidbits we can relate to, but we also like to read about characters who do and say things that surprise us.
So I guess I do overall agree with Peter Dunne’s statement, but the emotional truth he talks about seems like it could be a mere nugget in the character, enough to make him/her feel like a real human being without making the character simply a carbon copy of its author.
How much of yourself do you put into your characters?
