Me, Myself, and My Characters
The incredibly talent Matthew Munson is my guest again today. Following from his insightful interview yesterday, it is now my pleasure to be able to present you with this post wherein he reflects on just how much of ourselves we put into our characters.
It's funny how you can write something and not often realize how much of yourself you're putting into it.
I'll give you an example. In my debut novel Fall From Grace, coming out in the next couple of weeks, there's a character called Joseph Tempur, and it was only after the first draft did I realize how much he was like me. Both of us are atheists, stubborn and love writing.
His reactions to everything that was happening to him and his friends was pretty much how I suspect I would react in a similar situation.
When you're confronted by something that shakes your existing knowledge or belief system, it can shake you to the core, and Joseph was certainly shaken by his experiences – as I would be too, undoubtedly.
As I wrote the second and third drafts of the book, I made more of a conscious decision to
mirror our personalities to a degree; whilst we're not exactly the same (I haven't given him dyspraxia, for example), there are a lot of similarities. I even gave him a piece of my own personal back-story in one version; when I was nine, I write a short story about a cowboy who travelled through space before going back in time and visiting the dinosaurs. Well, as it turns out, so now has Joseph.
At the first draft stage, I did consider rewriting Joseph to make him less personal to me, but I decided against it; I like the character and he fitted into the story well. I'll be very conscious of my next book, though – once is enough.
I wonder, though, how often authors will breathe life into their characters by giving them their own, real-life, personality traits? I suspect it happens quite often!
Fall From Grace is scheduled for release this month through Inspired Quill. It is already available on pre-order at both Amazon.com and Play.com so feel free to reserve your copy today.
You can get in touch with Matthew via both Twitter and Facebook, or via his blog and don't forget to check back on Thursday for a sneak peek at Fall From Grace.
