Writing Tips

The Writer's Influence

At this point you've probably heard or noticed, that all characters a writer makes carry a bit of that writer with them. Their personality, their voice, culture and bits of their wishes.

This might come out in more or less obvious ways, from self inserts to all characters having the same voice and a plastered on personality. But it also heavily influenced the plot and the entirety of the world understanding.

Realising your own influence on the character, and making them independent from you will bring a lot more color to your gallery of personalities, and will hopefully help make some characters more than just enablers to make the protagonist shine.

How do you influence your characters?

Age and gender:
The most simple influence is your age and gender. These affect your life experience, level of empathy, maturity, patience, political views and so on. Plus, depending on your age, different things become important. A 14 year old girl is much less likely to be into a political drama, than a woman of 45, and has less life experience to see through people's feelings, because they haven't been in those spots themselves yet.

Gender is also, rather famously, an example. But on more layers than what papers usually bring out as manchouvanism.

Men and women have different fantasies and different writing styles. It's everything from women using more adjectives, to idealizing the opposite genders.

These two, are probably one of the biggest influences if you write romance stories. Extremely so.

This also means, that you write characters that are often similar in age to yourself when you start out writing.

Personality:
Quiet people that think before they talk will automatically make less reckless characters, and airheads will make more reckless characters. Your personality does come out in both characters and writing style. For example: I can't write an airhead without making them seem unreasonable and annoying. They're so far from my personality spectrum that it's hard to write them.

Your fantasies:
Which Clichés we use, and how we use them, is a strong influence we can have on the story, and it comes both from our age, maturity, personality and culture.

A typical example in manhwa, is the guy that goes into a dress store, and buys everything. Not everything she wants. Everything.

The girl acts all shocked like she doesn't want it. Acting frugal and poor, as she usually is.

And yet this happens and is treated as romantic.

Basically, the author thinks this is romantic. To be spoiled beyond belief and get everything they could ever wish for, even if they pretend to wish for the opposite.

Meaning, the girl is deceitful too. The character might say she's not there for the money, but the plot and the situations are saying the opposite.

If you don't believe me, let's take it out of context it's born in.

A girl marries one of the richest men in the country. He's an asshole to everyone. Famously so. They both consider it romantic to go into Gucci store or whatever else is the most expensive clothing store in the country, and he buys all the clothing in the store.

I would have been horrified by the immense waste of money of the guy just choosing everything without any regard of whether it suits me or either of us like it. He basically doesn't care about it and is just throwing money at it to make choosing someone else's problem. And she thinks it's romantic.