One of our goals here at Today’s Author is to help all of the writers among us to do what we love to do: write. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by talking to each other and learning from each other. Our Writers Circle series is designed to do just that – provide a chance for us to discuss writing, editing and publishing questions.
This week’s topic is:
Last time we asked about your inspiration for settings. Today we want to talk about characters. When you are creating characters, do you base them off of real people you either know or have seen in books, movies or TV shows? How do you change the characters so that you keep them realistic but do not run the risk of them being easily identifiable with the person you based them on?
Let’s discuss this in the comments and see what our community thinks.
Today's Author 
My personal opinion is that all characters are based on other people in one way or another – I feel that it would be almost impossible to create a new character without any external influences… even if it’s not intentional!
Everything we writing is based on our knowledge and experience. Most characters I build are composites of either of people I know or based on prototypes. For example, to create a doctor you can assume a certain base set of characteristics such as education, working life and then from there add things from doctors you know like, caring person or egotist or whatever fits the need of the story.
I pattern my characters after people I’ve known in some way. I stick true to the personality except for maybe one or two traits. I also stick with the same gender. Physical traits and emotional wounds are the two aspects that I always change enough so that the character isn’t recognized, but I make sure these parts have little effect on the personality.