{"id":913,"date":"2019-04-23T17:00:06","date_gmt":"2019-04-24T00:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nomadauthors.com\/blog\/?p=913"},"modified":"2019-04-24T14:05:31","modified_gmt":"2019-04-24T21:05:31","slug":"to-clone-mfrwauthor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nomadauthors.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/23\/to-clone-mfrwauthor\/","title":{"rendered":"To clone or not to clone\u2026? #MFRWauthor"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ABy cloning here, I mean using traits of friends or family as part of your characters\u2019 personalities. It\u2019s a touchy thing, for sure!<\/p>\n

I wrote a blog post years ago about five of us friends working at a company in New Jersey. I felt so close to these women\u2014they were work sisters. One of the group died of cancer at a very young age and I wrote about how I\u2019d first met them (they were already a working team when I joined). My first impressions were of \u201ca blonde,\u201d a \u201cwoman with big hair and pictures painted on her nails,\u201d and \u201can aloof woman who I thought hated me.\u201d That was exactly how I pictured them when we first met. I didn\u2019t know<\/em> them. I didn\u2019t yet know how smart, caring, beautiful they all were, inside and out. That wasn\u2019t the point of the blog post, either, but when they read it and responded, I had to see the post from their perspective. One woman wrote and asked was her hair really that big? Another asked \u201cSo I guess I\u2019m the aloof one?\u201d I felt terrible!<\/p>\n

Now granted, a blog post isn\u2019t the same as using friends as a basis for a book character, but the result can be the same. I have a friend whose friends asked her<\/em> to make them characters in one of her books. She used different \"Angry names but some<\/em> physical and personality features as secondary characters, and two out of three were angry over how she\u2019d portrayed them. They didn\u2019t like the parts in the book she assigned them, didn\u2019t like how she portrayed their personalities, didn\u2019t like\u2026 Well, you get the picture.<\/p>\n

Another friend told me that she based a cheater and womanizer on a former boyfriend and that he would recognize himself immediately. I advised her against going that route! No need making enemies on purpose when life throws enough roadblocks our way to begin with.<\/p>\n

In Passionate Destiny<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, I broke that rule. I used a former boss as the basis for Margaret. If he read the book (which I\u2019m certain he did not), he would have recognized himself in a skinny minute. The difference is, he would have laughed! He was the nicest man in the world, but he did have a snobbish side and he wasn\u2019t afraid to show it. That\u2019s what I drew on for Margaret as she moved from a professorship at a New Jersey college to rural Virginia, where people have to pump their own gas and folks chat at the grocery check-out counter. So maybe the trick in having characters resemble friends or family is to be sure they have the temperament to laugh at themselves.<\/p>\n

\"CreatingWe all view people around us\u2014their looks, their quirks, their actions\u2014as fodder for rich characterization for our books. We can\u2019t help it! But when it comes to those closest to us, maybe have a talk about what you have planned before<\/em> writing.<\/p>\n

Read the next blog in the blog hop by going here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dee<\/a>
\nOnly a Good Man Will Do<\/a>: Seriously ambitious man seeks woman to encourage his goals, support his (hopeful) position as Headmaster of Westover Academy, and be purer than Caesar’s wife. Good luck with that!<\/p>\n

Naval Maneuvers<\/a>: When a woman requires an earth-shattering crush of pleasure to carry her away, she can’t do better than to call on the US Navy. Sorry, Marines!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By cloning here, I mean using traits of friends or family as part of your characters\u2019 personalities. It\u2019s a touchy thing, for sure! I wrote a blog post years ago about five of us friends working at a company in New Jersey. I felt so close to these women\u2014they were work sisters. One of the … Continue reading “To clone or not to clone\u2026? #MFRWauthor”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,466],"tags":[519,518,521,8,520,459,23,502,464,130],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-writing","tag-characterization","tag-characters","tag-creating-characters","tag-dee-s-knight","tag-friends","tag-mfrw","tag-nomad-authors","tag-passionate-destiny","tag-rules-of-writing","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wA33-eJ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nomadauthors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nomadauthors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nomadauthors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nomadauthors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nomadauthors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nomadauthors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":944,"href":"https:\/\/www.nomadauthors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions\/944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nomadauthors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nomadauthors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nomadauthors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}