Authors, Where do Your Characters Come From?

In writing this piece about where authors get their characters, BBC America’s Oz and James' Big Wine Adventure featuring Oz Clarke and James May came to mind to illustrate perfectly two personality types of authors I have known: the arrogant, self-impressed expert and the down-to-earth writer.

Oz Clarke is a wine expert, but he absolutely must ram that point home by vomiting facts and terms to separate himself from garden variety experts. Such arrogance in his case, while pathetic, is also comical. I do find authors in this mode to be pathetic, but comical in no way. Authors of this stripe want people to fawn over them always remaining at their feet and always being undyingly grateful for the nothing they have given.

Authors in this mindset will often resort to pithy, inflated descriptions of their craft and process saying things like the characters are inside them waiting for the author to give them birth. I seriously do not know how much of such bloviation stems from too much wine now or bong loads back in the seventies, but I am instantly unimpressed with authors who impress themselves. Authors such as these are utterly unwilling to giving insight into how they write because they do not just want to be more creative than you, they want to be more creative than creative geniuses.

Authors of the second mindset—the down-to-earth variety—will be quite candid as to how they created a character. They may say they base some characters on a person they know. A character may be an amalgam of a number of people. A random observation in a supermarket may give an idea for a character. A picture may create a character and from there the hard work of characterization begins. Some authors go grocery shopping through their character’s eyes. Through it all, this second group of authors will talk about the hard work they go through to envision and enliven their characters.

The Salton Sea Chronicles would like to hear from authors. Where do your characters come from and how to you bring them into reality?