Basing characters on friends

Where do authors find their characters? How do they choose their names? I often base mine on people I know, sometimes even leaving the whole thing intact. Students are a great source. Pick a first name from one student and a last name from another, and I have a character name that I know is perfectly realistic. I have to be careful, though, as my students are from all over the world, and mixing and matching in that pool can produce nonsense.

A few times I have chosen names, especially Japanese names, with the meaning in mind. “Ikenami” means “pond wave,” which as far as waves go, can hardly be a big one. It fit nicely for character that was a tempest in a teapot. In A Scowl Becomes Me, I wanted to name the protagonist’s wife Blessed. So then I named several of the Japanese characters with names that all mean “blessed.” I enjoyed having the protagonist learn the meanings of their names one by one.

More often, however, I choose Japanese names that are as different from each other as possible, as I know foreign readers can have a hard time keeping Japanese names straight. This was especially daunting in The Man Terror Club, as there are so many women and they are all important to the story. I purposefully tried to make them sound as different as possible, while still making them mainstream Japanese names.

I have also occasionally named characters I like after friends. It makes them more three dimensional for me. This can be even more true if the friend lends not only the name, but also the character’s personality or appearance. The female protagonist in my first novel, Under Shōko’s Bed, was inspired in part by experiences of a friend of mine (although it is mostly fictional). In The Time Well, I have based characters on a few friends. They have tentatively allowed me to use their full names, and seem to enjoy becoming part of the novel. I am planning the sequel now and one friend in particular is helping me understand how her character will react to the twists in the plot. The only real problem is that she is too busy to spend much time reading and giving me feedback.

The greatest problem with using friends to create characters is that I can never recreate the original person perfectly. So how does a real life friend feel when a character based on them does something they would never do? It has to be disconcerting. And that uncomfortable feeling could exceed the flattery of having one’s name or personality appear in the pages of a novel.

More importantly, I suspect all my characters are me. I am in there for good or ill. I wonder how my friends will feel about all being hybrids with me? I imagine our faces contorted and merged with Photoshop. It’s not pretty.

Perhaps the best way for me to think about it, though, is in line with advice I recently got from a friend who is a lawyer. I was wondering if the organizational setting for one of my novels, which is not at all flattering, could be close enough to a particular organization that I would wind up getting sued. My friend asked who the publisher was, and when I said I was self-publishing, he told me that I shouldn’t worry about it. He said that chances were no one would read it anyway. 

Final lesson: some problems are more rhetorical than real. It’s important to keep things in perspective.

The idea: A Scowl Becomes Me

All my male protagonists are alike. They’re all me, except better looking. In all the novels except The Man Terror Club, which has no male protagonist, the men are sensitive and on the romantic side. They are not particularly emotionally resilient. They are confident in their intelligence and often overthink situations, but are not so socially adept and appreciate being propped up by a heroine. None are overly ambitious, certainly not to the point of obnoxiousness. They tend to be middle-aged. Most surprisingly, women are much more attracted to them than they ought to be, so none have to scheme elaborately to attract their female protagonist.

With that in mind, I felt the need to write someone different, someone not as genial, someone supremely confident. And I wondered what would happen if I made him a little off-putting, perhaps an irascible know-it-all. Of course, he needed some redeeming qualities as well: clever, honest, cares deeply about people who manage to break through. I would also need a situation that threw him together with the female protagonist so they could not easily escape. After all, few are attracted immediately if someone’s obvious qualities are a turnoff.

I should have put myself into a snarky mood each day before I started writing. It was necessary, because what naturally comes out of me is the type of character that is warm and empathetic. This novel needed cool and distant. But non-snarky me wrote warm and empathetic for far too many scenes. 

I kept writing anyway. I liked my characters and didn’t want to throw them away. I also wanted to discover how they got to the vague endpoint I had in mind. So my character didn’t turn out to be as big a turnoff for the female lead as I intended. Still, I came up with a way to torpedo their relationship.

I need to come up with another distasteful but redeemable character. I had an interesting idea about an American road trip for a family that’s disintegrating. I have also thought about sequels to The Man Terror Club and The Time Well, although I already know those characters, so they wouldn’t stretch me as much. 

Maybe an ax murderer. I’ve already done a nice-guy kidnapper and a well-meaning serial killer. Perhaps someone not so stabby, another curmudgeon.