Creative writing: How 'real' are your characters?

‘I'd better watch what I say or I'll end up in your next book...’

I imagine every fiction writer has heard these words, usually from the least likely person in the room to make a good character in a novel, and most of us have probably given the same answer: ‘I never write about real people.’
 
Do we, though? Can we help ourselves? We all want our characters to sound like real people, so what do we take from real life, and what does it take to write a convincing character?

Let me start by saying that I don’t believe it’s possible to make anything up completely – by which I don’t mean that we can’t write things that are original and fresh and surprising.

It's simply that everything in our heads comes, originally, from things we’ve seen and heard and read. Speculative fiction might be different, I grant you, but those of us writing novels set in the ‘real world’ have to accept that we’re simply drawing threads out of the vast pool of human experience and weaving them into a narrative which we hope will give our readers (and us) a new perspective on life, or simply a few evenings of pleasure and satisfaction.

Or to put it another way: we’re taking the great kaleidoscope of human characters and human history – the myriad possibilities of human relationships and joys and tragedies, the infinite variety of circumstances and personalities – and turning it to create a new pattern.

But writing about actual living people is the domain of non-fiction, and takes years of research, not a casual conversation at a party. My firm opinion is that it’s a risk that’s not worth taking for a fiction writer. Not because I’m worried about being sued by a casual acquaintance unhappy about how they’ve come out on the page, but because it’s more trouble than it’s worth and is highly likely to ruin your book.

Want to get revenge on your old boss by making him the villain in your next thriller? My advice would be to make sure he’s dead in the first chapter, because if you let him live any longer, either he won’t really be much like your old boss any more, which will rather spoil the point of the revenge, or the effort of making him real will take over the book and distort everything else.

Let it, perhaps, be your little secret – an association no one else will recognise but which you know is there. Re-imagine him as someone a foot smaller, twenty years older, with a different set of annoying habits, and you’ll be in business.    

Sometimes, I confess, I do begin by thinking, and perhaps even writing in my notes, something like, ‘James is a bit like Joe Bloggs?’ – but it never takes long for James to get a different idea. And yes, that really does happen, and it’s what makes writing novels so exciting.

I’ve hardly got five pages into any of my novels before realising that the people I was writing about weren’t exactly the ones I’d been planning to work with. The first time it happens it’s a bit disconcerting. You want to say, ‘Hang on, I’m in charge here. You can’t say that – and forget that gleam in your eye, because that’s definitely not what’s going to happen to you.’

But believe me, it’s best to go along with them. They know what they’re doing, even if they need a gentle authorial nudge now and then to keep them going. And honestly, if you try asserting yourself and insisting you know best, it won’t end well.

They have to live, you see. They won’t look and sound real unless we let them do that. They have to find their voices, reveal their motivations, work through their relationships with their mothers. When you put them in a room with another character you have to sit back and listen; perhaps wait a little while. They’ll speak when they’re good and ready, and if they don’t then perhaps it’s the wrong room, or the wrong company.

But of course we set them on their way, these intrepid fictional characters. We pull the threads of their lives out of the pool; we turn the kaleidoscope until the pieces inside it align in an intriguing way.

And yes, we borrow things from real people. We can’t help it, because those are the ingredients at our disposal. We pick up character traits, life events, turns of speech. People we’ve known all our life or passed yesterday in the street; people we read about in the news or remember from our primary school classroom.

Everywhere we go we listen to people talking. I don’t bother to write things down because the right phrase, the right cadence, the right gesture have a way of presenting themselves when they’re needed. I don’t usually know where they’ve come from, but that’s fine. They belong to the people who’ve adopted them now. To the real people who are taking shape on the page.

The House at the Edge of the Woods by Rachel Hancox is published by Penguin (£9.99)

Are you interested in stories based in truth? Read more about writing fiction based on a real-life character

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