Borrowing a Spark

I honestly say I haven't built out a character based on a celebrity. Entirely. That's because I'm using characters they've played, instead. Or I pick a look from over here and aspects of a personality from over there and munging them together to generate my characters. I might isolate an attribute and assign it to someone in one of my books, but to pick up a person wholesale, change a name and a hair color and call it good? No. Can't. I think it's mostly because I don't actually know these people - the celebrities, I mean. I only know what I get to see and that's the characters they play. I'm aware that those characters come from the actors, themselves, but - eh. Welcome to me overthinking. Maybe it's the acting degree. But. If you want a list of the people I've taken as inspiration - that's a loooong list. A long list. It's a list populated by a sordid history of aesthetic crushes. 

Lupita Nyong'o, Tom Hiddleston, Brendan Frasier, Taika Waititi, Vico Ortiz, I mean. I could go on forever with this. There is nothing I've seen, music I've heard, or places I've been that hasn't shown up in a story.

My favorite tea shop turned into a tattoo parlor for Nightmare Ink.

Anyone who works out how to force blogger to let me insert a two -column table into the page and put photos in it gets a cookie. I doubt it'll even let me do that with html at this point. ARG. Anyway. 

If you read any of my stories and you think you recognize a personality quirk in a character, you may well be right. But I'll deny it like mad and tell you it's entirely a product of my own imagination. Yet the truth is that when I admire someone's body of work or a specific look they cultivated for a role or a shoot, it's impossible for me to subsequently create something of my own that doesn't pay homage to whatever struck me in the first place. I guess I'm borrowing a spark from someone else's fire to see if I can't kindle a fire of my own.  

No Time for Tea

Last week’s topic was our fantasy dinner parties and who we’d invite. Yeah, I missed it. So my image for the week is my favorite tea cup to make up for it! 

This week we’re talking about real people we’ve based characters on. I think to some extent every character we write is a conglomeration of people we know or have met. How else would we write relatable characters? 

The only character I’ve truly based on someone is actually another character: John Hammond. From his cane to his white hat and clothes as he stepped onto the Jurassic Park screen, John Hammond. He fit the side character I wrote in The Mars Strain, Dr. Dresden. 

One of my author highlights was when a friend of mine was gushing about my audiobook and asked me if I’d pictured John Hammond from Jurassic Park when I wrote Dresden. I was so excited that she’d pictured him how I’d written him! Especially because I didn’t say who he looked like, I wrote Dresden’s looks into the story. And she picked up on it perfectly! 

As for basing a character on someone I know in real life…I can’t say I won’t ever do it, because that’s basically ensuring I will at some point, but it’s not an intentional goal of mine. I prefer my fictional creations to be bits and pieces of those I know and of myself. My goal is to write characters you can picture sitting next to at a restaurant or hanging out with around a campfire. And yes, using a real person template would do that, but when we read we want larger than life. So why not glue parts of multiple together to create a character that’s bigger than all of them? 

How about you? Have you based a character on someone you know? And the more important question, did they read it and recognize themselves?