Little Bits of Me

I decided today that my main character of book 1, Alex, is obsessed with peanut butter and chick lit. Peanut butter because it's delicious, obviously, and chick lit because it's an interesting thing for someone who is otherwise dark and angry to love. I think it will be fun to mess with that. I was tempted to be super meta and have her be obsessed with YA books, but that would be just slightly overkill, I think. Still, it's nice to have these things figured out about her. It only took three drafts, though I fear at this rate I'll never stop adding things to this book. It will go on forever until someone shows an interest in it.

I often find that I want to give my characters some of my traits. Like someone needs to be addicted to Mountain Dew right? And someone needs to make sure everyone knows that Parks and Recreation is the greatest television show, and that Brandi Carlile is an amazing musician. And maybe this character is also a night person and takes corners too sharply when walking so they have bruised elbows. Maybe they get the Three's Company theme song stuck in their head once a week and still walk tightrope style along a curb, even at 24 years old. Maybe they give into peer pressure on the highway and drive faster than they want, just because everyone else is doing it. And frankly, not enough characters in books - nay, the world - are showing the proper love for baseball. There needs to be a character who is or does all of these things right? Because obviously, these are the makings of an awesome person.

And honestly, I do throw in bits and pieces of me into characters. Some of my insecurities, some of my interests, some of the qualities that I wish I had. It's a way to see things from a different perspective, to see how it feels if I were to act on the anger I sometimes feel, like Alex does, instead of bottling it up, like I do (mostly in the interest of keeping my job).

But it's tricky, because you don't want people to read your book and think to themselves "oh my gosh, this is how Lindsey feels. She needs a hug or a shrink, I'm not sure which." A character's opinion on things like marriage or race might appear like a reflection of your own opinion, even when it's far from it. A character's view on parents or best friends might seem like how you feel about your actual parents or friends, even when all you're really doing is trying to throw as many shitty people and situations at your character as possible, for the sake of conflict.

So I guess what I end up doing is this: I cut out small parts of real life and stick them onto huge bits of my imagination. I  might be influenced by a real life experience, but since most of my real life experiences have been pretty tame, I'll exaggerate the crap out of it until it's barely recognizable. Eventually I come up with something filled with people that are simply not me, people that some days I'm sure must be out there going about their day just like I am, completely independent. Which would be really cool, I think. But alas, I am not living in the world of Ruby Sparks.