Writing Credible Characters

'Write what you know!'

Tell that to the Sci-Fi writer, s/he doesn't know how science is going to develop and yet they write and sometimes help to invent things (or at least they give the inventors something to look at, to try to invent).

Submarine - Jules Verne

Taser - 'Victor Appleton'

Robot - Karel Capec

Earbuds, Flatscreen TV and Surround-sound - Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

Cellphone - Star Trek

3D Printer - Star Trek

Self-driving Car - Isaac Asimov

The writers that 'invented' these things had no way of 'knowing' them, so the 'write what you know' advice is debunked.

Again, I can only give advice on how I write. If you can take something from these pieces of inside-know-how, I'm happy.

My characters are a melting-pot of people I've known - or fleetingly met - and I expand upon them to make characters in my books.

I've been chatting online with a good friend today. She has had a problem with someone we both know - a man with little going for him in looks and personality. I gave her advice on how to 'deal' with him and hundreds of men like him - don't allow him to rent space in your head.

He's a bully and he doesn't like women to be self-confident. A few years ago, he tried to brow-beat me online - never in person, he's too cowardly for that. The closest he got to a personal confrontation with me was a 'discussion' about my writing.

"Yeah, so what, you've written a book," he said in the sneering tone he uses to try to undermine a woman's confidence.

I turned my back on him and walked away, but not before I said, "Oh no Dave, I've not written a book. I've written Four."

You see, he wanted to write a book, but instead of chatting to me about how I write, he tried to make me feel bad about what I do (did) in order to somehow make himself feel better about how far he hadn't got with his own writing.

That's not how it works in the world. You cannot make your own candle brighter by dimming another's.

Source

I also know how that kind of person works too. He will be following my writing career, secretly hating every little success, every compliment and discussion I'm involved in.

He sneaks into earshot when I'm talking with friends and he eavesdrops. He takes snippets of conversation and twists them to make people feel bad about themselves and he uses that as 'currency' in his own mind.

Carly Simon sang "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you..." She knew people like Dave, too, it would seem.

That kind of person is good for only one thing - to use as the basis for one of my characters - a sneaky, sly, worthless creature who will get my readers hating his every action, every word he utters.

You see, it's that easy - and it's that hard.

There are a number of these characters in my books:

Certain aspects of Darius - he is a main antagonist and therefore, he has a complex mixture of different 'bad attitudes' and character flaws.

Stephan - is based on a horrid man from my online past. The man stalked women in their real lives and terrorised them before ending up in court as the precedent-setting first person to be prosecuted for online stalking in the UK.

Entwhistle (Lickspittle as the other characters name him) - is an amalgamation of a lot of undesirable traits collected from people I've known over the decades.

Source

If you can capture the essence - good or bad - of a person you know, then exaggerate it, make it bigger and badder then that character will stick in your reader's mind longer - especially if they can actually feel some kind of emotion towards them. Negative emotion seems to leave residue in the mind, nagging at the reader long after they put down the book (or at least, that's what I hope for my characters).

On the other hand, the same goes for positive qualities too - but don't make the character too perfect, everyone has flaws, even if they try hard to hide them. Show your reader a flaw and the character will endear themselves to your readers and stay with them long after they put down the book after 'The End'.