How many fictional characters in novels are based on real people?
I’d guess that it’s a large majority. I’ve never written a novel, so that’s just a hunch. Even if it’s just abstract or on a subconscious level, I think a lot of authors pull from their own experiences with other people when creating characters.
When The Paris Review interviewed E.M. Forster, author of A Passage To India, he said as much.
How much do you admit to modeling your characters on real people?
FORSTER
We all like to pretend we don’t use real people, but one does actually. I used some of my family. Miss Bartlett was my Aunt Emily—they all read the book but they none of them saw it. Uncle Willie turned into Mrs. Failing. He was a bluff and simple character (correcting himself)—bluff without being simple. Miss Lavish was actually a Miss Spender. Mrs. Honeychurch was my grandmother. The three Miss Dickinsons condensed into two Miss Schlegels. Philip Herriton I modeled on Professor Dent. He knew this and took an interest in his own progress. I have used several tourists.
Can you say anything about the process of turning a real person into a fictional one?
FORSTER
A useful trick is to look back upon such a person with half-closed eyes, fully describing certain characteristics. I am left with about two-thirds of a human being and can get to work. A likeness isn’t aimed at, and couldn’t be obtained, because a man’s only himself amid the particular circumstances of his life and not amid other circumstances. So that to refer back to Dent when Philip was in difficulties with Gino, or to ask one and one-half Miss Dickinsons how Helen should comport herself with an illegitimate baby, would have ruined the atmosphere and the book. When all goes well, the original material soon disappears, and a character who belongs to the book and nowhere else emerges.
Here’s how I’m interpreting that.
The inspiration is a real person, probably someone you know, but as you put that person into the book and slowly develop the plot and their character, the original inspiration disappears and that character becomes a “person” in his or her own right.
What do you think? What (or who) inspires the characters in your writing?
(Image: Wikimedia Commons)