Who Are Your Characters?

This might be a simple question, but I think it’s much deeper than most think.

Characters, whether they’re our own or not, have an origin, have traits, personalities, ideas, morals and goals. Each one is different and all of them share a similarity: their creator.

We can all see that each character of ours is somehow, very much like us, almost like our children (or hypothetical children) they normally carry down something from us that’s beyond the appearance. If you know a creator personally, like best friend kind of level, you might even distinguish some traits in their characters that’s very much related to your fellow creator.

I’ve definitely given all my characters a little bit of me. Each one carries an aspect of my personality.

Trying to be as spoilery-free as possible, this is what I can safely determine in my own characters: Hel is the stubborn/melancholy/introvert part of me, Muirne is the flirty/smug part, Annie is the innocent/naive, Belladonna is the classy, Phyrra is the hopeful and Evina is the overprotective.
To a point, even their past has similarities to mine but most likely 1000x more tragic.
(Except Belladonna, I think Belladonna and I have no similarities in terms of backstories.)
Some times even the parents of your characters (if present in your story) will probably have something from you, and maybe actually embody a bit of your own parents/caregivers too.

I know each different character of mine embodies a different piece of me but their actions and reactions are different, their thought process, their burdens, all that. I’ve given them the tools and I am writing out their stories, but there will be a point where their choices/answers start to come naturally after understanding who they are and what they’re doing, almost as if they start to write themselves, their stories can be completely different from ours or very similar with a little bit of spice.
It’s very possible that we’re not really conscious about this when we’re designing our characters and their stories, and some times we are conscious about it because we want to really make our characters very much not like us, or we’re writing them like us as almost a comfort or a desire to achieve something more. I know I would love to have the powers of a witch, or be a powerful vampire, but I am mostly giving them pieces of me because I try to make my characters imperfect and very much like a human, “write what you know.”

I feel as if writers and artists, do what they do to express their innermost thoughts and desires, a way to release emotions and unload our baggage without having to really burden anyone. Creating is very therapeutic and for some it really helps us deal with whatever we’re going through but some times it’s not even like that, maybe nothing is going on and we just have so much adventure in our hearts that we just want to pour it out and what better way than to write your characters and give them an adventure to go on? Of course it doesn’t have to be an adventure, slice-of-life comics have proven to be very entertaining without needing to ride on the back of a giant red dragon.

There’s a lot that I could write about this but I feel like eventually it would just turn into a whole bunch of knots because my thoughts are very much everywhere and I would eventually bore you, but I want to know, do you share pieces of yourself with your characters? If they have parents, are they anything like yours? How do you go about writing your characters? Is it an innermost desire or just something you were thinking that would be cool? LET ME KNOW :D



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