Writing and Real Life (tm)

This is more a question to garamet IMHO, but feel free to chip in, everybody!

How much does your life influence your writing? By RL I also mean Cyberspace in that case, everything that's not fictional. I, for one, have a hard time getting characters I know out of my story to have fictional ones in. For some reason, most slowly start to take on traits of people I am acquainted with - even superfluously. Is that normal? Is it a problem once you get lucky and thus published?

The problem I have right now is that I want to write a character who's in favor of war. As it's SciFi, it's a big war and all, but: for some reason, I can't get rid of the WF stereotypes here. Same goes for my non-SciFi work: somehow, every character ends up with bits and pieces of a friend and/or fleeting acquaintance of mine. Never mind, whenever I go to the pub, there's lots of types that are much more alien than my SciFi aliens

Any tricks to prevent this? Is there a mental exercise to get the real world out of the system when writing? Or is it just a lack of imagination on my part?

I am not Garamet, of course, but I'll chip in anyway. My question back at you is: how else would you create realistic characters?
I make up characters, but I do instill traits in them that I either remember from people I met, or that I imagine people I met, have. Well, that, and probably characteristics from characters I remember from novels, or don't particularly remember but that came from them anyway.
What you think up comes from what you experience, so I don't see the problem. Many authors even model their characters to resemble real people on purpose, intending for them to be recognised - e.g. to criticise that person.

If you read biographies of writers, you come across all kinds of links between the writer's personal life and the characters in their books (e.g. in Proust's books). So there is really nothing wrong with it.

Your problem with WF stereotypes is more likely to be that they are stereotypes, flat characters, often enough, not well rounded characters. A person who is in favor of war, doesn't have to be a raving lunatic, he can be a kind father & a good friend at the same time. It's like combining the red,green and blue room to get a complete picture.
For example: Storm often seems like a complete idiot to me, yet he also seems to be a caring father. That probably means his red room statements are a little over the top, on purpose. Deflate the ego a little, and he could be a normal person The Red Room threads are a-typical, I think, because they can show what people are like in the heat of the moment. So they could be perfect for a novel in situations where a character is pushed and pushed until he reacts with anger. For other situations, you could use other people.

Finally: though you think a character looks too much like a friend in a certain respect, and like another friend in another way, I doubt it is obvious to the outside world. When you read what you have written about that character, it triggers all the associations you have with those friends. But those associations are yours alone. They may be completely different for someone else's and the people you write about may not even recognise themselves or agree with your view on them. But more importantly: you may 'read' things you didn't actually write down. Although your writing triggers the memory of a friend, you may not have caught enough details on paper to portray him/her accurately to anyone else. That doesn't mean it's bad writing, it has just become a 'unique' character.

everyone I write about is made up of people I know.

Of course, everyone I see reminds me of someone else, so I have a fluidity of faces going on in my head all the time

Hmm...maybe part of the reason I'm having such a hard time, is I've been trying to purge RL, WF, and TV out of my head, but then that doesn't leave much if anything for pickings.

You have to draw from real life. Otherwise what is there? Mimicking other writers' characters from novels or movies or TV? Neither interesting nor fun.

Plotlines you can steal, and shamelessly as you get more practiced at it, because there are really only a handful of plots in the universe.

But characters either present themselves to you with a story to tell (the way I do it) or they become the Chorus and the Players for the particular Greek tragedy you want to tell (as Cassandra's doing).

Either way, in order for them to be interesting to a reader, and not just voices in your head, they need to have substance. You as the writer need to know what they look like, what they sound like, what they eat for breakfast, what little quirks and tics and nasty little habits they have.

You don't necessarily need to share all of those with the reader, but you need to have them stored away in your head somewhere, so that when your character has already conquered numerous dangers, you'll know ahead of time that his belly's going to shrivel when he looks down into the snakepit and says "I hate snakes!"

This is not to say you take people you know and plunk them into your work wholesale (although I pretty much did that in my Preternatural trilogy, though it was the first time I tried it). For one thing, it can ruin friendships. For another, it can get you into trouble. For yet another, it's actually harder to do and often less effective than taking snippets of people, putting them in a mental blender, and seeing what comes out.

So if you wanted to create a pro-war type, for example, you might make him also a Second Amendment type, but not a Texan. Then again, you might make him a Milquetoast who wouldn't know how to hold a gun, but has vivid fantasies of conducting his own personal wars against everyone who's ever bullied him. Or make your character a gun-toting woman who used to be a peacenik until she was jilted by her hippie boyfriend, or a young female military recruit who believes the "fight 'em there so we don't have to fight 'em here" version.

You see? Many possibilities.

My characters tend to be aspects of my own personality, amplified and exagerrated somewhat. Those for which that is not true tend to be idealized versions of what I like in people.

Minelli from VietNam by Moonlight, for example, is my overconfident smartass self set in (duh) VietNam. I think I posted that story here way back when . . .

My longest-running character (Anastasia Palmer is her name) is mostly my idealized woman. She's defined by what I find most attractive in women.

The tall man from my NaNoWriMo story is basically my arrogance given form.

And so forth.

Yeah, I do something like that, except not well, and they all seem like the same crummy maladjusted person.

Mine tend to be drawn from archetypes as well as real people. But being able to get into the secondary characters heads, and project why they do the things they do is a big deal to me - either in my own writing or reading others. But its hard to write totally outside of the bounds of experience - but then, that's what reading fiction is for.

Hence the reason why you need to work on getting out of the house and being someone other than the same crummy maladjusted person. Maybe you'll discover new characters that way.

Building up a big canvas of character traits to draw on is the main reason why I insist on taking public transport everywhere and refuse to drive a car. I'm busy people watching. Listening to the way they talk, watching what their tics are, their hates and their loves.

Characters have to have internal logic and be true to themselves, so if you can sit down and write a one page biography of a character even though it might not end up in the story, it will help. If you can't start at the beginning start at the end point, where you want them to be, and work backwards and try and work out the psychology of what action/decision/experience led to this that and the other viewpoint/reaction and work out the chain.

Be meticulous about the psychology, do the groundwork and fairly quickly the character will have its own personality and will be speaking to you. You'll pretty much know what it will and won't do without having to consciously think about it.

The key to understanding how to write a character that has a worldview different from your own is to remember that that character, even if they're the main villain, has belief that they are right and that what they are doing, in their mind, is for the better. What that 'better' is depends on the role of the character, but it it's heart it's the rationalized justification. Whether the character is an ultruistic do-gooder, better for them is to help society, or a far right scum-sucking shitbag, better them is what's in it for them. For that type of character you have to some extent actually think like a selfish prick to understand it and empathize with it.

In the end, if you don't believe it, the reader won't.

The other thing I would suggest is when you sit and write that biography. Do a second one, but this time, write it in the first person as that character. If sat in a room and asked them about themselves, how would they react, phrase it, where would they get uncomfortable, etc. It's a good way of finding their voice.

We used to do "Dirk Diggler" scenes in HS where you would pretend your character is looking in the mirror and psyching themselves up for something. It really helps sometimes, you never know what's in there.

Yeah, I used to use a mirror. I read last year that Dickens used one quite a lot. It's a very useful tool. Acting in general is very useful in learning how to find a character.

I draw on my own experiences for a very large part when I write. Since I write a lot of military style SF, (or used to, anyway) I find that there is one big advantage and one big disadvantage:

1. The big advantage: I met and interacted with so many people at all levels in the military, some who I liked and others who I didn't, that I have an endless pool of archtypes to draw on when creating characters. And I can also take those same characters, twist them, and make them bad guys with realistic motiviations.

2. The big disadvantage: It can be very, very difficult to write about topics you know something about, because you have to make them fresh and interesting for other people to read, and not get caught up in senseless minutiae. I found when I was writing stories as a teen, before I'd hit the real world, it was easier to just dive in and create the worlds I wanted, and to hell with any sense of realism. Of course, those stories were pretty bad and my characters were all caricatures of Luke Skywalker, James Bond, and Frodo Baggins.

"The name's Skywalker . . . Frodo Skywalker."