Matt Dunn talks about creating characters.

If there’s one question a novelist (well, me, at least) always gets asked (apart from “where do you get your ideas from?”, to which I always reply “there’s a great website – IdeasForNovels dot com”), it’s “is the central character based on you?”. I’m never offended – after all, I don’t write books about serial killers – but though I don’t always like to admit it, the answer is quite often a resounding “yes”.

And I sometimes apply a similar approach to the supporting characters too. There’s a saying that goes something like: “when you write a novel, half your friends will be annoyed because they think they’re in it, and the other half will be even more annoyed because they’re not.” Most authors will probably smile wryly at this, but there’s a reason why, at the front of very novel, you’ll read a disclaimer that says something like ‘any similarity between characters and persons alive or dead is purely coincidental’, and that reason is, well,  because any, ahem, similarity isn’t always, you know, purely coincidental. Well, at least in my books!

Of course, while most of us writers – me included – wouldn’t stoop so low as to completely and accurately reproduce our friends and family in the books we write, it’s probably fair to say that many of us do occasionally ‘borrow’ or exaggerate facets of people we know’s personalities, or pinch things they’ve said, or even the way they speak, in order to give life to characters on the page.

Certainly, the supporting characters in my first two books – Best Man and The Ex-Boyfriend’s Handbook – were based loosely on friends of mine. At the time – and it was early on in my writing career – it just seemed easier to imagine someone I knew, then just write that down. And it seemed to work.

I now know most novelists take a much more formal approach – spending ages writing full character CVs, or even question-and-answer profiles so they know exactly what a character’s like. This works well – I’ve done it myself recently. But strangely enough, I’ve found my best received characters have all had a dose of reality about them.

For me, though, my naive approach meant that creating the characters was easy – probably because the central one was me, albeit in a slightly different guise each time, and the supporting cast were made up of caricatures and composites of my friends, or people I knew, or in some cases, people I’d only briefly met (but who had obviously made a lasting impression!). For me, it certainly made the writing process fun, too. After all, who doesn’t like to put words in other people’s mouths?

For The Ex-Boyfriends Handbook and its two sequels (Ex-Girlfriends United and The Accidental Proposal), writing the two main characters was even more fun, because they (Ed and Dan) were two such diametrically opposite people. I pretty much took a Jekyll and Hyde approach, so much so that my agent, on reading the book, opined that Ed was me with a conscience, and Dan was the person I’d like to be! I’m not sure how true that is (or what to make of it, actually!), but it was fun to put yourself in a character-who’s loosely-based-on-you’s shoes and see exactly what you can get away with – and hopefully that fun comes across in the writing.

All this meant my new book, A Day At The Office, was actually quite tough to write – at least to start with, because it was a very different book in a technical sense. My previous novels were all told from the first-person point of view (and always with a male protagonist) so when I was writing them, once I’d got myself firmly into the mind-set of the main character, telling the story was usually pretty straightforward – once I’d sorted out exactly how “I” would react to the situations “I” found myself in, all I had to do was make sure the jokes were funny. But A Day At The Office is written in the third person, and told from multi-viewpoint, male and female points of view, plus the story-lines all had to work together, the various timings all had to correspond, and on top of all that, the jokes had to be funny.

It was also the first time I’d written a book without one main lead character, so creating five who’d all get an equal share of the action, and all had to be believable, normal, real people (unlike, say, Dan in The Ex-Boyfriend’s Handbook series, who’s probably closer to a caricature than a character), was quite a challenge. As was the fact I had to try and make them significantly different, which was why it was important to sit down and have a long, hard think about how they’d be, how they’d look, how they’d dress, speak, act, what their hobbies were, where they lived, even in some cases what they ate, and even how they’d get on with each other. It was also the first time I’d written as a woman – and two of them, to be precise. Which probably made the thumbnail sketches I built up of each character even more important, though whether I can cut it as a girl – well, the readers will have to be the judge of that.

Anyway – that’s just what works for me – like I say, different authors have different approaches. As for my next novel, well, I’m pretty sure I know both protagonists already, which will hopefully make the writing process a little easier.

And if you read this and then read one of my books, and find yourself thinking ‘that Matt Dunn knows some strange people’, well, you might be right. But for the sake of good material, I’m very pleased I do!

Matt Dunn’s new novel, A Day At The Office, is available exclusively on Kindle download now.

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by

Laura

I’m Laura. I started Novel Kicks in 2009. I wanted a place to post my writing as well as give other writers like me the opportunity to do the same. There is also a monthly book club, a writing room which features writing prompts, book reviews, competitions, author interviews and guest posts.

I grew up by the sea (my favourite place in the world) and I currently live in Hampshire. I am married to Chris, have a cat named Buddy and I would love to be a writer. I’m trying to write the novel I’ve talked so much about writing if only I could stop pressing delete. I’ve loved writing since creative writing classes in primary school. I have always wanted to see my teacher Miss Sayers again and thank her for the encouragement. When not trying to write the novel or writing snippets of stories on anything I can get my hands on, I love reading, dancing like a loon and singing to myself very badly. My current obsession is Once Upon a Time and I would be happy to live with magic in the enchanted forest surrounded by all those wonderful stories provided that world also included Harry Potter. I love reading chick lit. contemporary fiction and novels with mystery.