Can you base characters on yourself? Memorable characters?

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Morgan Jones
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Re: Can you base characters on yourself? Memorable characters?

Post by Morgan Jones »

there will always be a little bit of yourseld in every character your write. Whether a side of you that you show publicly, or a private side no one really knows about. It's what makes an author relatable and how readers could connect with you. It also brings realistic depth to your characters and storyline.
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Post by JazmynElizabeth »

Usually it's an accident; I'll be writing a character and then I become the character and the story becomes my life.
Often people base their characters based on who they want to be, and these are generally bad because while most people avoid Mary-Sue characters, it's also rare for somebody to write a character that's properly flawed. Usually their flaw is 'caring too much', 'being a perfectionist', 'vulnerability', 'moodiness'. 'anti-conformism' or such like, which is unrealistic. Nobody keeps their flaws in their characters. Nobody makes a good-guy character whose flaw is selfishness since Wuthering Heights. There aren't nearly enough good-guy characters who have uncontrollable rage, or bad-guy characters who are caring and loyal. If it's too easy to sort a character into 'Good' and 'Bad', then it's a badly written character in my opinion.
And if you're basing a character on an idealistic version of you, then it'll be easy to sort it into 'Good' because you want to be a good person.
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JazmynElizabeth
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Post by JazmynElizabeth »

Building on my last post, I think the reason people find it so hard to give people proper flaws is because they grow attached to them. They write as one person, they spend so much time developing them...so they want readers to love their characters as much as they do, and that's unlikely if the protagonist is immature, insane, or rude, even if they are still basically a good person.
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Sushan Ekanayake
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Post by Sushan Ekanayake »

if you are an unique person, what is wrong in adopting yourself into the character. I think taking one's self as the story character will make the work easy because the author can exactly say what he might do in the situations which occur in the fiction
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