When I first started writing, a friend of mine told me that the prospect made her nervous. "You'll put me in one of your books," she said uncertainly, "Won't you?"
But actually, in my experience, it doesn't work like that. In the Observer this weekend Barbara Ellen wrote an article about a survey which asked nine thousand women to make a celebrity-based composite of the Ultimate Woman. The popular response mixed Keira Knightley's cheekbones with Kate Middleton's hair and Angelina Jolie's lips and the result was a spooky android - someone who looked as if she had had industrial grade silicon inserted in all the wrong places.
You can run the same risks in fiction. If you borrow a bunch of characteristics from people that you know, apart from making them jittery and traducing various friendships, it's possible that you will end up with a character who is never more than the sum of their parts. In literary terms it can be a false economy, a shortcut to a two-dimensional heroine, rather than a living, breathing, fascinating and confounding one. When you're writing, it's almost always better to go the long way round. Jot down everything you know about your protagonist, either in note form, or in little vignettes which show them in action - it's like the small talk which helps you to get to know someone you've just met: while you're chatting away, before you know it, something will catch your interest and you'll want to get to know them better.
Both as a writer and as a reader, I think it's more interesting to be given a fleeting glimpse of a character which then seeds itself in your imagination, rather than to be shown the equivalent of an identikit picture (even if she is the Ultimate Woman). Try to avoid transposing people into your stories, as that becomes a literal exercise rather than a literary one. Instead, explore the deep core of your own invention - it's more mysterious and infinitely more satisfying.
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