How to Turn Your Life into Fiction Step 6: Characters
When you decide to turn your life into fiction, determining which characters to include, on the face of it, seems a simple task. However, once again, you must remember that your story needs to entertain the reader. Therefore, you must make sure that your characters are complicated and interesting. I’m not saying that your life is filled with boring people, but in order to make a story fly, it needs strong characters.
Know your characters
In order to create strong and complicated characters for your life story, you need to know the people you are writing about really, really well. I mean, you need to know them inside out.
When using characters that you already are intimately acquainted with, it’s useful to treat them as if you didn’t know them at all and chart their likes, dislikes, and motivations as if you were making them up. Treating your real people as characters gives you some distance from the story and allows you to write a narrative that makes sense to the reader.
Analyzing your characters in detail, as if they were unknown to you, will, in turn, let you get under their skin and make the story colorful and gripping.
Make a List
To get to know your characters fully, it’s useful to make a list of the main points about your characters.
I use the following list for each character in my novels. Sometimes I add a few details, sometimes I don’t fill in everything.
Role in the novel
Personality (Dislikes, beliefs & fears)
Appearance
Job/Occupation
Family connections
Main passion in life
Character Flaw(s)
External Conflicts
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but one that works well for me. How much your story is character-led, depends on the kind of book you are writing. To determine the genre of your life story, see my post here.
Leave out characters
When writing a book about your own life, it’s easy to add all the people that you know or knew. But having too many characters in a novel can be confusing for the reader. So try not to include every real person in the novel. Too many characters can make the story unnecessarily complicated and jarring.
Make a list of all the people in your story, in the order of importance, with their roles in the novel. You’ll soon discover if there are characters that you can drop.
Combine characters
If, however, leaving out people from your life story seems impossible, or there are still too many in the book, try combining characters.
Merging two or more real people into one character will make them stand out in the story. It’s well known that the more inconsistent and torturous a character is, the more enjoyable reading about them is. Having a smaller number of characters will also increase the pace of the novel, which in turn will make it more interesting and enjoyable for the reader.
It’s also good to combine characters that are too similar.
If there are plot points in your story that include characters that are very alike but still need to be included in order to tell the story, combine the people into one character and the events into one scene.
If you don’t need to combine characters for any other reason, you might wish to consider merging two or more real people into a new character to save yourself from awkward moments when your book is a best-seller and everyone’s reading it! This is a wonderful insurance policy for the future. 😉
Over to You
Are you struggling to know which characters to leave out and which ones combine into one? Comment below and start the conversation.
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