whoa hey a meme!

[lettered]

Pick a character I've written and I'll list the top ideas/concepts/etc I keep in mind while writing them that I believe are essential to accurately depicting them.*

*I don't think it follows that if other people don't have those concepts in mind they're inaccurately depicting them. For what it's worth.

Comments

[jjhunter]

Anyways, I find that even when I write characters with whom I do not identify, such as Tony and Pepper . . . I end up identifying a lot in spite of myself.

This reminds me a great deal of an excellent piece of advice I got re: acting: to become someone else, you first need to deeply understand yourself. The more you understand yourself, the more precisely you can use your own personality and experiences as building blocks to emphasize or de-emphasize to bridge the gap between being yourself and inhabiting that other person.

To write is to call up little bits of yourself to act as the characters you write - how could you not identify in spite of yourself, even just a bit?