(I know many of you recognize this photo. I used it just last week in my Christian Communicators Blog post, The New Me. I hated to reuse the photo so soon, but when I decided to revisit this blog post from 2010, I knew I HAD to run this same photo again! I hope you don’t mind.)
The more I teach at writer’s conferences, the more I realize how blessed we are as writers if we have home-grown, ready-made characters in our families. You know what I’m talking about…the eccentric grandpa who buys moonshine along with the eggs, the prim and proper aunt with the colorful past, the entrepreneurial dad with the can-do attitude and the can’t-do bank account. Yes, I am blessed as a writer.
Most fiction writers admit that even though their characters are rarely exact duplicates of anyone, many are compilations with bits and pieces of various people, thrown together into a hash of the real and the imagined. And the results can be a quite entertaining.
Take Bitsy’s dad, for instance. Anybody who knew my daddy knows this fictional character is Bobby Skinner. Bitsy’s dad has my dad’s entrepreneurial spirit, his joy of making a people laugh at his own expense, and his determination to come up with a business deal to make his family rich. As a matter of fact, when I teach my Writing is Fun workshops in schools, I’ll stop here and say, “Ask me if we ever got rich.” The students will ask and then I say, “No. But he was such a character that I’ll be able to write for the rest of my life and never run out of ideas!”
So here’s what I’m asking you today: Who are the characters in your family? In your past? In your present? What are the scenes from your life that are compelling? Unusual? Hilarious? You can take those people and those scenes, and-again, as I tell my young students-”You just make them bigger, badder, meaner, sadder.”
Family eccentrics and memorable scenes are gifts for us writers. But I’ve recently had a revelation about quirky characters: I am one. Yep, last week I realized I’m the character my children and grandchildren can draw from if they ever decide to write.
And I’m not sure how I feel about that. I think I’m happy about it.
I think.
