Characters are what make novels for me. I love to fall in love with a character or detest a
character or to hoot with laughter at a character. So, creating characters is the most important part of writing for me. Almost all my characters are based on people I know or have met at some point. Usually, the main character of my novels is not based on me, but without meaning to, the character normally adopts mannerisms, preferences or biases that I have myself. With Finding Ruby, I was asked if Ruby was in fact me – after all, I too had been travelling in my twenties and I too used to work and live in London. But no Ruby was not me, or not at the start of the novel anyway I like to stress pointedly! She is more closely aligned with me as the novel progresses and as she develops from her journey, much in the same way I did.
I haven’t challenged myself yet to write a novel with a protagonist wildly different from myself. I don’t have the confidence yet to do this but hopefully one day, I will rise to the challenge. I enjoy creating those wildly different characters as the ‘other’ characters in my stories. As I said, I usually base them on people I know; sometimes they are amalgamations of a few people. This way, the way they speak, move, think or interact with others is more convincing.
However you invent characters, the key advice I would have for you is to allow those characters to grow. I teach my students to create character profiles before writing their stories e.g. likes/dislikes, children, hobbies, job etc. I sometimes do this with my key characters, but I generally keep it quite loose and add or change details about them as the story develops. I like my characters to be organic. They change and grow sometimes as I am putting the words on a page. Just the other day, I decided to alter the name of a character 60,000 words into my new novel. In Finding Ruby, the love interest didn’t start out as the love interest, he started off as a bit character. But the more I wrote about him, the more I fell in love with him, and consequently so did Ruby. This can make for a much more convincing character development because isn’t this often the way things happen in life? The person you thought you didn’t have anything in common with becomes a die-hard friend; the rather plain woman who you didn’t notice at first suddenly becomes all-consumingly attractive; the guy who was drop-dead gorgeous is actually completely dull.
So, by all means, create those character profiles but be flexible with them, allow them to breathe, get to know your characters. Sometimes they can take you off on the most amazing tangent and surprise you by doing something you never thought they would. Sometimes they can be the making of your story. Sometimes, you might just fall in love with them.