Friends As Characters | Like A Writer

Hey Guys x

Welcome to the third instalment of my series 'Like A Writer'! I've been loving doing these so far!

Just to reiterate - with all of these posts, this is just my personal opinion. I'm not a published author, so don't think that what I'm saying is something that you definitely have to do! In fact, take everything I say with a pinch of salt, see what you think about it and comment your own opinion in the comments.

This week I'm mainly talking about secondary characters, but this can apply to your main character(s) too.

It's really easy to base our characters on people we know in our real lives, and in a way, this makes complete sense. What better way to make a character 3 dimensional than to base it on someone you really know!

In the book 'See Jane Write', it gives the advice: 'shoplift a few items, don't steal the whole store; - meaning, take a few personality traits of your friends, don't insert their whole selves into your story.

To me, this makes perfect sense.

If you insert everything about your friend into your story, it restricts what you can do with said character. For example, if you base your main character's best friend after your own best friend, it'll be hard to do something drastic with that character.

Like, if you want that character to be an alcoholic, or go off the rails, you'll be restricted based on the fact that, your real best friend wouldn't act like this in real life. But also, what will your friend think if you based your bad character on him/her.

And this works for all people.

If you base characters on friends so obviously that your friends can tell who they are, it may backfire on you. If that character does something bad, your friend might be upset. If that character dies, your friend might be upset. If your character does anything that your friend wouldn't do in real life, it might upset them.

And the worst thing when trying to be creative is to worry about what other people think. Even with blog posts, it would be really hard to write if I was worried that someone might be offended or annoyed by something I'd said.

And on that topic - even if you're not basing characters on your friends, it's still harmful to worry about how friends and family will view the book.

Pieces of creative writing are extremely subjective - someone will always love what someone else hates.

While writing 'Lou's Novel', I'm not even thinking about how my parents will view it - to be honest, I'm not even expecting them to read it!

Write because you feel passionate about what you're writing about.

Thank you for reading

Comment below more 'Like A Writer' topics for me to discuss!

Keep Smiling - Lou xx