Generating characters: bringing your monsters to life! (Tip 47)

Where do characters come from? We have to build them the same way Victor Frankenstein built his monster – out of bits and pieces of other people!

Here’s the link for the trigger game :)

There’s a story about the novelist Gustave Flaubert. According to the story, a gossipy correspondent was pestering him to reveal upon whom he’d based the scandalous character of Madame Bovary. Flaubert replied several times that the character was not based on any real individual but when his correspondent persisted, Flaubert snapped and replied, ‘Madame Bovary is me.’

The point, I suppose, is that when we write any character, we have only our own experience of emotions on which to draw. Even if your character lives on the planet Stigiwonk in the year 3030, if that character is afraid then it is to your own experience of fear that you must turn. We may be afraid…