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Character Driven Stories
What Drives My Writing
The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I’ve borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen or noticed or remembered in the flesh — a cast of countenance here, a manner of walking there, that jumps to the visualising mind when a story is under way. I don’t write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy is too strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close — those known to you in ways too deep, too overflowing, ever to be plumbed outside love — do not yield to, could never fit into, the demands of a story. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in its own right another human being on the page. ― Eudora Welty, On Writing
Whenever someone mistakes my fiction for a true story, I smile. To create these characters, I take characteristics from people I know, whether they are lifelong friends or passing acquaintances, and combine them with the traits that best fit the character.
Having determined what characteristics best suit my character, I dive into the story, and through this process, I become more familiar with him or her. I…
