Writing non-fiction I find rather easy. The blog entries for my neighbors, for example, have the ground work laid out for me. Sure I come up with some rather (non) clever names for them rather than use their real names, but for the most part the characters are provided for me I just have to relay the message in my own words.
Writing fiction on the other hand requires you to come up with your own characters. I find this appalling hard to do. Any would be author can give a name or a description of someone, but coming up with (not so) real flesh and blood characters is a whole other matter.
I find that generally when I write a character I have a real world person that I kind of use as a foundation. This does not mean that they are carbon copies, but more so I use some small personality quirks from a person I might now or have read about and apply them to a character. This kind of takes them from being a few words written on paper or a computer screen and breaths some life into a person.
Say that I am writing about a young kid that is walking home from school. Does that really conjure up a mental image in your head? I know that it does not in mine. Now say that I have a friend who constantly mumbles to himself as he walks about his business. Slowly you might start pulling in a mental image of that. You may have no idea what my friend looks like but you probably know at least one person who might mumble to them self as the walk around.
Strong personalities really make or break a character. That is one reason why I love to meet interesting people. Even something as simple as how some carries them self and their demeanor may give me motivation to write for a character in a story I am working on.
I have a hard time writing female characters. As it happens, I have a penis not a vagina so it is hard for me to imagine not having a penis and having a vagina; however, say I meet some woman who acts in a certain fashion that makes her unique (or a character if you would) that might be something I could apply to a female character that I would otherwise have no direction for.
I have been stuck writing one of my stories for sometime. I got to the point of where the male leading character meets the female leading character. I was very happy with the story up to this point. I knew exactly where I wanted to take the story but simply had no idea how to get there. Every time I tried writing for the female character it felt forced and wooden. I would read over it and think to myself "this is just a man written as a female character." I then just reduced her role to the point that she was just filler. This kind of defeated the whole purpose of making her a leading character.
I attempted to apply personalities of people I knew to her but was just not happy with the results. Simply put the idea I had in my head for her just didn't not come close to what I had to work with. It got so bad I simply put the story down and haven't touched it in a couple of months. Then recently I met someone and quickly realized that this was the personality I was looking for in this character. This doesn't mean the character is that person, it just means if you knew this person and you knew the character you would say to one of them, "you know you would really like ******* you and her act a lot alike."
This does not just apply to female characters of course. That is just one recent example of a character I have struggled with. Getting over a hurdle like that can be very exciting because it gives you a renewed vigor to keep pressing on.
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