“As a writer, do you often base characters on people you know in real life?” (Requested by Charles E Leggat)

Definitely. As a psychology geek, the inner mechanisms of my character’s brain, their reasoning methods, and their thought patterns need to be fully fleshed out if I want to have any luck writing a realistic character. That’s a very hard thing to do, and it’s a very common theme for me to pull personality traits out of people I know, including myself.

Fully fleshed-out and properly complex characters are awesome. For example, in Harry Potter, characters like Hermione Granger (who was based off young Joanne Rowling), Luna Lovegood, Draco Malfoy, and Severus Snape are all particularly well-known and (on their own levels) well-loved characters. Meanwhile, characters like Harry Potter and Voldemort are just kind of…there. Their personalities don’t have much nuance to them, and they’ve never been too well-loved as characters. It’s a common theme for an author to spend so much time on other characters that they don’t pay enough attention to the main character(s). In the case of Harry Potter, Harry was a bland character, but everyone around him was full of personality (besides Voldemort).

The best way to write a unique and interesting character is to give them quirks. They might be annoying, exhausting, or endearing to other characters (and…