How to Create Realistic Characters (Without Putting Your Friends in Your Novel)

When I was twelve, I started writing my first “real” book (that is, a book that was over 50,000 words). It was about a girl and her group of middle school friends who somehow got transported to another realm and had to defeat a bad guy who had kidnapped another friend of theirs. It wasn’t good.

There were many issues, but the most glaring was that the lead character was obviously based on myself, the friend characters were based on my views of my friends, and the villain was based off of another student I didn’t like very much.

They say “write what you know”, but there are a lot of problems with just inserting real people into your books. First of all, some real life people might have problems with you revealing their personal information, but also it can lead to oversimplifying your characters because you know the person so you don’t have to explain to your readers what they’re like. It can also lead to not wanting to be too hard on a character because you like the person they’re based on (the common Mary Sue/Marty Stu problem), or not being able to imagine them with different layers because you don’t want to think about the real life person that way.

Character building is hard. It’s probably one of the skills I struggle most with. It was a long time before I stopped basing characters off of real people. Even through college, a lot of my characters were still somewhat based on my friends, although with some changes.

Here’s some insight into how I create my characters, and I’m still learning.

1. Build a character from the ground up

Don’t start with a real person as a platform (“He’s just like Jimmy, but…”). Flesh out a character without basing them on people you know. Pick out their hobbies, their manner of speaking, their family, their fears, and their goals first. There are a lot of character sheets out there you can fill out, or simply create your own. One of my favorite things to do is come up with a fake quote my character “said” that gives insight into their personality (ahem). It also helps develop how they talk, which is just a headstart in writing believable dialog.

When I was developing Tales of Mundane Magic, I started with the basic concept of sisters and their ghost dog. One of the sisters had an accident with her eye that allowed her to see things that weren’t there (whether that be magic spells, ghosts, or the future), and the other collected enchanted hats. But I had to go deeper than that. What did each want to do with their lives? What hobbies did they have besides those basic facts? How old were they? These were all things I had to figure out before I started writing.

2. Find a reference image

This may or may not help you, but when I write I find I do such a better job being consistent with how I write a character if I have a reference image of that character. You could commission an artist to draw a character for you, give them a description of how you picture the character and let them run wild with it, or you can scour the internet for models or actors (that you don’t know) who give you the proper vibe of your character.

I put emphasis on “that you don’t know” because if you choose an actor you know from a TV show as your reference, you’re much more likely to base your character off of the TV show character.

The reference image doesn’t have to be perfect, but the most important thing is the vibe it gives off. Is your character tired and disillusioned a lot? Make sure that’s the feeling you get when you look at the picture. Does your character think he’s the funniest thing in the world? Get a picture of your reference laughing, or at the very least smiling.

3. Write a backstory for your character

Now you have all these facts about your character that you’ve come up with, either during brainstorming or as you’ve started writing your work. It’s time to piece them together and figure out how they came to be.

This is helpful because real people don’t just pop into existence. If a character knows how to lockpick, we need to know why. We might not need to know why a character loves mint chocolate chip ice cream, but if the reason is that her father also loved it and they would bond by being the only two people in the family that liked chocolate chip ice cream, then maybe it’s worth knowing the character’s connection to her father. If a character has trust issues, explore in the back story how that came to be. If you have the canon that they were betrayed by a close friend, then maybe that close friend can come back and cause problems further down the line. You never know what you’re going to discover by writing a backstory.

At the very least, a backstory fleshes out your understanding of your character. No longer do they look at the ocean and think ambiguously of how peaceful it looks. Now they look out over it and remember all the fun times they had at the beach before they broke their leg.

Also, it’s really fun.

4. Now write what you know, if you have to

Maybe you say your character Bob has a good sense of humor, but you’re not sure how to write that. Enter your hilarious teacher with a funny one-liner and you go – oh, Bob should have my teacher’s sense of humor.

But you’ve already built up character Bob so much that you’re only borrowing this one trait from your teacher. Bob isn’t going to be based off your teacher.

Maybe Bob has a younger sister, Lucy, and you’ve established that they have a somewhat antagonistic relationship. Maybe you can base their interactions off the interactions you see between your two younger siblings. Again, Lucy isn’t one and Bob isn’t the other, but some of the scenes where they argue can be inspired by real-life events.

The important things about borrowing from real life is to borrow pieces, and not all from the same source.