The solution to all this is simple. Use your family and friends as the starting points for characters — but then use the full process of interrogation to transform them from the people you think you know into the characters you really know. In other words, make new people out of the old ones.

  Then discard all the extraneous details. Just because you’re modeling the character on your sister doesn’t mean that the character has to look like her or have the same career or the same taste in clothes or the same childhood experiences. Jettison anything about the real-life model that isn’t essential to the new character and disguise everything else that you can.

  Then if your sister or father or friend later asks you, “Was this character supposed to be me?” your answer can be, in complete honesty, “I’m glad he seemed so real that you thought he was like you. But you’re much nicer (prettier/more sincere/gutsier) than that character.” If you’ve taken bits out of your friend’s life that can’t be fully disguised, you can say, “I might have taken some bits out of the lives of people that I know — that sort of thing can’t be helped, it happens without a writer even noticing — but the characters are meant to be themselves. None of them are modeled on any particular person.” If you have done the job of fully inventing your characters, this statement will always be true.

  I learned all these lessons the hard way. When I was in college, I wrote a play based on my mother’s family. My only source was Mother’s own reminiscences of childhood and adolescence, told to her children as we grew up. I loved the stories — and besides, I had been told, time and again, “Write what you know.”

  The result was a pretty good little play, given the state of my skills at the time. But when my mother saw it, she was aghast. She made me promise not to invite any of her brothers or sisters to see it.

  Why? There were no villains in the story. Everyone was sympathetically portrayed.

  The problem was that my mother knew something I had not thought of: She and her siblings weren’t likely to remember these events quite the same way. Even though these things had all happened more than thirty years before, feelings would be hurt, questions would be raised, and old family tensions would be revived.

  And the funny thing was that the best things about these characters were not the elements I took from Mom’s stories. The best things were the motives and misunderstandings, the dialogue and the details that I had invented to flesh out the tales.

  That is always true. Modeling characters on life is not a method, it’s a starting point. The characters who come to life on the page or on the stage are the ones that have passed through the storyteller’s imagination. Your readers already “know” people as well as real people ever know each other. They turn to fiction in order to know people better than they can ever know them in real life. If your story tells them nothing more about people than they already know, you’ve let your audience down. By sticking to the facts, you cheat them out of the chance to learn the truth.

  Yourself

  Okay, you’ve never murdered somebody, and your character is a murderer. Does that mean you’ve got to go interview people on death row in order to find out how they think?

  No. Of course you can interview them, and you might get some interesting insights — though all the warnings about modeling characters on friends and family also apply to modeling characters on interview subjects. There’s an added problem, too: Interview subjects never tell the truth. Oh, they may think they’re telling the truth, but in fact their stories and statements are altered by the fact that they’re telling them to someone else. They want you to think of them a certain way, and so they’ll emphasize certain things and leave out others that don’t make the right impression. If you believe everything you’re told in an interview, your story may be less true than if you never interviewed a soul. At best, an interview will be a starting point — you will still go through the whole process of character invention.

  There is one person you can always interview, however, who will tell you much more of the truth than others ever will — yourself. You can imagine what it would take to get you to behave in a certain way.

  So what if you’ve never murdered somebody? Haven’t you ever been blindingly angry? Haven’t you ever longed for cold revenge? You’ve felt all the emotions, all the motives. All you have to do is imagine those feelings and needs being even stronger, or imagine your inhibition against violence being even weaker.

  Was it a crime of passion? Then imagine what kind of provocation it would take for you to be filled with murderous rage, and then find the sort of provocation that would get that same reaction in your character.

  Was it a calculated murder in order to win some objective? Then figure out which of your own attitudes you’d have to change before you’d come to regard murdering somebody as a reasonable way to get him out of the way in order to achieve your goal. What if you were fighting for some desperately important cause? What if you had grown up in a situation where killing was commonplace? What if you had cause to think other people were all beneath consideration?

  Analogy

  What if you just can’t imagine yourself doing something? Then, instead of trying to think of what it would take to get you to do what your character does, think of something you actually have done that is like what the character does.

  For instance, Michael Bishop faced this problem in his brilliant 1988 novel Unicorn Mountain, in which one character, Bo, is a young homosexual who is dying of AIDS. Bo and another character are at a motel swimming pool when three muscular young men come to swim. Bo might have had any of several responses: envy at their health and strength; resentment that these boorish young heterosexual men don’t have to pay a price like AIDS for their sexual activities. But what Bishop chose to show was simple lust. These three young swimmers had attractive, muscular bodies. Having AIDS hadn’t stopped Bo from being a homosexual. He still looked at these young men with desire.

  I believe that Bishop, who is not a homosexual, based this scene primarily on analogy. What is it like to be a homosexual with AIDS? This question surely came up again and again as he worked on Unicorn Mountain. I think it led him to this analogy: It is very much like being a heterosexual with a fatal disease that has cut you off from having sex with anyone, but hasn’t yet made you impotent or weakened your desire.

  Bishop knew what we all know, that swimsuits reveal people’s bodies a great deal more than business suits do, and that nowadays swimsuits are designed to emphasize sexual attractiveness. It just happened that Bo was interested in and aroused by the men at the pool. Yet he was not affected the way a woman is usually affected when watching men in swim-suits. He was affected as heterosexual men are affected when they watch women in swimsuits.

  Complicated? Yes. And yet it led Bishop to write a quiet but startling scene that rang true — with me, at least. I did not realize that I had been asking the question: What is it like to be a homosexual? But when Bishop showed me this scene, showed his character’s attitude toward these young men, I realized the question had been answered, at least in part — and that it was an important question, one that would matter to me even after the story was over, because it gave me a new way of looking at and understanding other human beings. In other words, Bishop had achieved one of the primary purposes of fiction.

  So if you can’t imagine doing what your character must do, then compare that act with something you have done. Is my character going to kill somebody to get her out of the way? Then I might think of a time when I carelessly disregarded someone else’s feelings because I was rushing to get a job done. I lost a friendship. I didn’t kill anyone, but I did feel that same single-minded focus on my goal that left no room for regarding another person’s needs. In my mind, that former friend had ceased to be a person. And, remembering that painful event in my past, I can then, by analogy, show how my character completely disregards the value of other people’s lives.

  Memory

  I’ve come to this last, because this is a deep well, but one that can quickly become exhausted. Whether you mean to or not, you will constantly draw on your own memory for incidents and characters in your fiction. In fact, all these other sources of characters arise out of memory — your memory of your friends and family, your memory of strangers.

  All these memories are distorted by time or your own needs and perceptions. No less distorted is your memory of yourself — what you did, what you meant to do, what caused you to do things, what the results of your actions turned out to be. Yet, distorted or not, your memory of yourself is the clearest picture you will ever have of what a human being is and why people do what they do. You are the only person you will ever know from the inside, and so, inevitably, when your fiction shows other characters from the inside, you will reveal yourself.

  This will happen unconsciously, whether you plan it or not. Sometimes it will startle, even embarrass you, when you look back on a story you’ve written and suddenly realize how much you have confessed without even meaning to. I once handed the manuscript of early chapters of one of my novels to a friend and fellow magazine editor. She read it, and when she gave it back, among her comments was this one: “It’s an interesting exploration of self-alienation. This guy really hates his own body.”

  I smiled and nodded, as if that had been precisely my intent. But the fact was that I had no idea that such a theme was emerging in the story. Yet I knew at once that she was right, that without even meaning to, I had created a character whose situation exactly mirrored the cause of many of my deepest injuries and much of my personal anguish during my teenage years. It made it hard to go on writing the novel, in fact, because I was afraid that my novel was exposing more of me to my audience than I ever intended. In fact, it was. But I finished it and published it, and despite many flaws, the book remains one of the truest stories I’ve told.

  Whatever obsessions you have, whatever memories are most important to you, either negatively or positively, they are going to show up in your work no matter what you do.

  However, just because your memory will be an unconscious source of characterization doesn’t mean you can’t also mine it consciously. When I needed to show a child character’s attitude toward his older brother and sister, I remembered how I felt toward my older brother and sister when I was little; I even used incidents that showed what those relationships were like. In no sense were the characters of the brother and sister based on my own brother and sister — but the child character was based on my memory of what it was like being myself at that age. I know far more about myself than I’ll ever know about any other human being — it only makes sense that my most truthful material will usually come from my own recollections.

  The danger of delving into your own memory is that you’ve only lived one life. You’re going to keep coming up with the same incidents and attitudes over and over again, without even realizing it. This is where personal cliches come from, constantly mining the same spot in memory, the way a child will keep picking at the same sore. You have to make a conscious effort to keep from remembering the same things in the same way. In other words, even when you take a character directly out of yourself at some particular time in your life or in some particular situation, you still have to invent that character — ask the causal questions, exaggerate, twist.

  Finding “New” Memories

  What I’m about to suggest smacks of self-psychoanalysis, and for all I know it may have therapeutic value. But I suggest that one way for you to discover good characters is to search randomly through your memory, just as you move randomly through the world around you, with your idea net extended.

  The way you do this is to pick some arbitrary starting point. It might be a point in time: seventh grade, for instance. What school were you in in seventh grade? Who was your homeroom teacher? Who were your other teachers? I immediately remember Mr. Arella, the science teacher — a man I haven’t thought of in twenty years, yet his name was there, waiting to be dredged up. His was the last class of the day for me, and I recall staying after school the first few days, talking to him, asking questions. Partly it was because I really was interested in science, but mostly it was because I was waiting for my mom to pick me up — I couldn’t walk home carrying my tuba. By the end of the second day, he started calling me his “lab assistant” and talking about how I’d stay after school and help him clean test tubes and jars — not at all what I had in mind. I soon stopped staying after class; but I remember that later in the school year, I heard him refer to someone else as his lab assistant, whereupon he affixed me with a steady gaze for a few moments before moving on to talk about something else. Without meaning to, I had apparently hurt his feelings or let him down somehow — though he had never asked me whether I wanted to be his lab assistant.

  I also remember that in the encyclopedia I happened upon a description of how to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen using an electric current. I talked to Mr. Arella about it, telling him what I had figured out about how to conduct the experiment. He encouraged me; I went to a great deal of trouble to find batteries, strips of copper, and a way to hold everything in place while hydrogen arose from the water to fill an overturned jar.

  I set up the experiment for the first time in front of the class — it never occurred to me to rehearse in private. The experiment didn’t work. I don’t know why, and neither did Mr. Arella, but we never got that little puff of an explosion from a lighted match that tells you isolated hydrogen was present. It was frustrating and embarrassing.

  But that was nothing compared to the frustration when, a month or so later, he got to the electrolysis section in the textbook, opened the cupboard, and took out a complete prefabricated electrolysis device. All the elements were there, professionally designed, preassembled, and ready to use. After class I demanded to know why he had let me go to all that trouble when he had the experiment already in hand. “I wanted you to learn from your own experience,” he said. A noble thought. But at the time all I could see was that he had let me waste a ridiculous amount of time and caused me much public embarrassment, when he could have said, “Want to see electrolysis work? I’ve got the whole setup right here in the cupboard.”

  My only consolation was that his professional setup didn’t make any more hydrogen than my amateurish one did.

  All these memories came flooding back the moment I typed the words “seventh grade” into my computer. Are any of them usable for a story? Probably not directly. I have no idea how interesting this story is, but I suspect your eyes were beginning to glaze over before I had finished. Still, if I interrogate the character of Mr. Arella — or of myself — I may find an interesting story there:

  I didn’t do anything to “get even” with Mr. Arella, but what about a student character who did plot vengeance?

  Or what if the teacher character has a different motive for letting the student embarrass himself? What if he’s getting even for the student’s failure to serve as his lab assistant?

  Or what if I choose a different experiment, one that causes even more embarrassment than simple failure?

  Or what if I change the relationship and make it a husband and wife? The wife is going into the same line of work as the husband; she gets a terrific idea and sets to work on it. He encourages her, and she goes to great effort, but fails. Only later does she discover that he knew exactly how to do the whole job, even had key pieces of equipment or information that might have allowed her to succeed. When she confronts him, he says, “I figured you’d want to do it on your own.”

  “I didn’t care about doing it on my own! I cared about doing it right, and you could have helped me do that!”

  “What kind of career is it if your husband steps in and makes it easy for you?”

  “I put you through college, you jerk! What kind of education would you have had if I weren’t the kind of wife who stepped in and made it easy for you? People in business sometimes help each other. Nice people do, anyway. They don’t let somebody drown while they’ve got a life preserver in their hands!”

  “Okay, I’m sorry, I made a mistake!”

  “It wasn’t a mistake. You meant me to fail. You wanted me to blow it, because if I did it right then I’d be a threat to you!”

  “Oh, I see, I’m not just a husband who made a mistake, suddenly I’m a symptom of the whole male conspiracy against women. The trouble is, if I had helped you, that would also be part of the male conspiracy against women, since I would have been plotting to prove to you that you couldn’t succeed without my help!”

  And so on. This relationship has some story potential, though the scene itself is far too abstract to be useful — real people don’t stick to the subject so relentlessly while they argue. This scene would never end up in a story, but these characters, this relationship, might. And if such a story ever comes to be, who would guess that it emerged from the incident with Mr. Arella and the electrolysis experiment, which came to mind solely because I was randomly exploring through times and places in my memory.

  IDEAS FROM THE STORY

  As you work on a story, it will suggest characters to you — as long as you know how to look for them.

  Who Must Be There?

  Let’s say you’re telling the story of a young princess who’s being held captive in the top of a tower. If fairy tales don’t appeal to you, update it: A young girl who has been kidnapped off the streets of New York and is being held captive in an abandoned building. Or if melodrama doesn’t appeal to you, a girl who has to spend the summer with somebody unpleasant while her parents are off on a long working vacation in Australia.

  The story idea itself will imply certain characters. Since the girl is being held somewhere against her will, there has to be a person who is holding her — a “villain” who has caused her confinement. Also, there must be some people she was kidnapped from. If she’s a princess, by implication there must be a king or queen — or both — who want her back. Or perhaps she feels that her parents wanted to be rid of her. Either way, one or both parents must figure into the story.