: Re: How to avoid hearing "that's me!" from your friends when they read your characters? I recently asked about getting inside of someone else's head for writing good characters who are noticeably

@Odierno164

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I know this answer is very late to the party, but I do not ever take a trait unique to a single friend. Ever!

It seems like a shortcut to me, that would be harmful for the exact reason the OP put forth: My friend would recognize it, his other friends would recognize it, and if I don't make that trait purely positive and that character a perfect hero, I risk resentment from my friend, and risk having him made the butt of jokes by our mutual friends.

Isn't it a shortcut? Isn't it just laziness?

Doesn't it prove a lack of imagination on my part, that I cannot for the life of me invent an entirely fictional unique characteristic for my character?

Doesn't it show a severe deficit in my analytic ability and understanding of humanity if I cannot for the life of me come up with a "coherent" character unless I cast actual people I know in my fiction? With such a deficit, I have no business being a writer!

My characters may have generalities in common with my friends, but so do thousands of other people. I am a heterosexual with homosexual friends, if I write a homosexual character I may draw on "realistic generalities" I have learned from my homosexual friends, about themselves or their own homosexual friends, but in a way I expect to be true of tens of thousands of homosexuals. I will make strenuous effort to not include any detail I think is specific to only one (or even a tiny minority) of the people I know.

I want that character to ring true to any homosexuals that might read it, without insulting or invading the privacy or betraying the trust of anyone I know.

As for one comment about "writing what you know," I disagree. I at times need to write about thieves, spies, ruthless killers, rapists, corrupt cops and politicians, world class athletes and geniuses and businessmen. I write about magic and medieval settings, space colonies and aliens. I don't know what any of those lives are really like, and never will.

I can inform my writing with research, history, logic and inference, sometimes from people actually in those roles. So that my writing is plausible. That doesn't mean I know what it is like to be a prostitute: I do know what a few prostitutes have said it was like.

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