Are my characters copies of people in real life? ... Don't ever believe the stories about authors putting people into novels. That idea is a kind of joke on both authors and readers. All the readers believe that authors do it. All the authors know that it can't be done.
Sometimes after a compliment about my characterization skills, I'm asked if I model my characters on real people. Emphatically, no. And sort of, yes.
The best angles and the best stories always hinge on reality. Throughout the history of WWE, all the best storylines have a little touch of what's real behind them.
When I do a character, I try to base it on someone I have met or an experience I've had.
Derek, my character, in 'Chhichhore' is actually based on the director's real life senior in engineering college and I had no clue about it till he took me to Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
From Shakespeare to Robi Thakur, everyone has written stories about people and incidents around them. There is no creativity minus reality irrespective of how flowery or abstract you make it.
Every character I do is based on someone I know.
The character of Rosie is based on a woman who used to live in the same apartment building I lived in many years ago. She's taken on a life of her own, of course.
When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them.
A lot of times characters are combinations of people I come across in life. I people-watch a lot.
It's very rare that a character comes to mind complete in himself. He needs additional traits that I often pick from actual people. One way you can cover your tracks is to change the sex.
I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.
Some of my characters are a mixture of various aspects of people I have met. others are pure invention.
I spent a lot of time with a real detective, a lady detective inspector who was the only female detective inspector in the whole of East London. She and I hung out a lot. She showed me what she did and I spent time with her. So, [she was] a lot of the inspiration for the way I dressed and sometimes the dialogue in those interview scenes where we're cross examining and questioning the youths and trying to get a confession out of them.
Most characters are composed of snippets here and there of people I've known, and all rolled into the character I've created. They do become like their own people.
The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.
I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.
My characters are usually composites. I wish I could pretend that I make up all of these characters, but no. I steal from people. But people will say to me, "Oh, that's me!" and I'm thinking, no, that's not you!
Actors who are lovers in real life are often incapable if playing the part of lovers to an audience. It is equally true that sympathy between actors who are not lovers may create a temporary emotion that is perfectly sincere.
I often draw from people in my own experience to base a character on, going back to my days with Mike Leigh.
I want to be influenced by the world not TV or film.
No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.
All of my characters are a little bit based on people I know in real life. You know when you do that you have to change the character a little bit in case your friend or your relative reads the book, because you don't want them to know you wrote about them... They might get mad.
