I am a fiction writer, so I think it’s fun to say much of what I do is invent things, make things up. Thinking about it, though, I realize that not so much of what I write is fictional. It’s all of my life but under the guise of fiction.

I am an overly observant person. From people’s appearances to the ways the move and interact with others to the way they interact with me and how it makes me feel, I am constantly observing. I then create characters that feel real to me because…well, they are real to me. They have quirks that either I have or that I have noticed in others.

A lot of this is actually subconscious. I will create a character and it might take me weeks or months to realize the similarities they have to myself or people I have known. I have been reflecting on my current book and see where some of my characters originated. I am going to cite examples from my own writing as an exercise because I think it’s interesting how much fiction actually isn’t fictional. It makes me wonder – when I read books – who the authors’ inspirations were for their own characters.

Mr. Hwang

I am going to start with my absolute favorite character in my book. Mr. Hwang. He’s a Korean man – around 60 years old – who runs a small coffee shop that my main character frequents. Archetype-wise he is the “wise old man” of the book. He’s sweet and caring and treats my main character like a granddaughter.

I wasn’t particularly close to either of my actual grandfathers. One I have met maybe three times in my entire life. The other died almost ten years ago and while our interactions were always pleasant when he was alive, we weren’t close. I didn’t have a  “let me take you for ice cream and show interest in your life and come to your school play” type grandfather.

When I lived in Korea and taught English to businessmen, I had one student – Mr. Lee – who was the absolute sweetest man I have ever met. He was around 72 – my eldest student – and quite wealthy. But he was humble, open-minded, and clever. He expressed interest in my feelings, whether I was having trouble living in Korea. He took me to lunch sometimes and told me that if I weren’t his teacher, I could him “Grandfather.”

Living alone overseas is hard enough, but living there as a young woman – with hardly any work experience – was scary sometimes. I felt so alone on so many occasions, as if I was just floating around a bunch of people who didn’t know me or care to know me or ask me how I was feeling. His caring and understanding were appreciated more than he will probably ever realize. I thanked him many times, and chose – consciously – to incorporate a bit of him into my book. The character of Mr. Hwang helps my main character in times of crisis and is a shoulder for her to cry on. He gives her advice and views the world as a beautiful place. All of that is from Mr. Lee.

March’s photographic memory

My main character has a photographic memory. It works like a video recorder. She can go back in the store of past memories, pull them forward, and rewatch them whenever she wants. However, when she gets overly emotional, she can be bombarded by these memories – painful memories.

This comes from my own life. Since I was a child, being overly observant was a blessing once I channeled it into my writing. But until that time, it was terrible. I remembered the most upsetting and disturbing things I saw on TV or in movies, on street signs (once drove past a pro-life rally and I still remember all the bloody pictures. It made me too sick to eat for a day when I was around 7 or so.) I have the type of personality where I can’t stop thinking about things that upset me. I have read that this is part of being a writer – being obsessed with strange things. But I don’t enjoy it. It’s frustrating. “Think about something else” is advice that is repeatedly lost on me.

Thus, I channeled this to my main character. I thought – what could be worse than being really observant and obsessive? How about – literally not being able to forget any detail from anything that I have ever observed? I talk about times in her past when she watched a horror movie and ended up screaming in agony when the perfect memories of it came flooding to her when she tried to sleep. She catches her boyfriend cheating on her with her friend and the memories resurface at the most inconvenient times and consume her. It’s disturbing and horrible, but it’s her struggle. And her memory ends up being something useful when the story begins to develop. I almost feel guilty inflicting this on someone – despite her being fictional. But I think that’s what makes a good story.

Every mean character

I don’t have too many characters that are purely “evil.” I think often, in real life, there isn’t always a clear sense of bad guys vs. good guys. Therefore, even my most insufferable characters are real – meaning they have SOME redeeming qualities.

But lemme tell you guys…guess where I get those bad qualities from…

Ahem.

From the girls who were mean to me in middle school because  I was taller than everyone, to the men I have dated who treat me like I’m dirt, to the time my parents punished me, to the teacher who gave me a B on that paper instead of the A I should have gotten (because, dammit, I worked hard on that stupid paper for my senior seminar class! The professor was trying to push me because she knew I was a good writer and I rewrote my Beowulf analysis several times to get that A…but for every other class I could crank out a 15 page paper in 3 hours and get an instant A! /still bitter! haha) to that chick who gave me a rude look on the subway, to that guy who hollered at me from his car – “Hey, baby, what’s yo name?”

…

Every bad or irritating event or person I write has an origin somewhere. It might be from my own experiences or from horrid things I observe or hear about. But it isn’t all fictional.

It seems apt to end this with something a guy I dated a while back once said.

“I’m afraid if we break up some day…you’re going to write about the bad stuff I did to you in one of your books.”

Don’t worry, horrible ex-boyfriend. I won’t use your name.