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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34391
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Characters based on real people are the only ones worth spending any time on.

You will never achieve any real depth with an archetype, or with a walking plot device. To fool the reader into spending real emotion on a fake person, you have to make them seem real, and there is absolutely no better way to do that than to closely watch and observe real people. The very best writers were all observers of people, and the people they observed came out in their writing.

The plot is an abstraction just like the setting. It _doesn't matter_ whether the character is sitting on a steam train heading into the old west or about to be launched into space to board a starship or sitting in an office cubicle. What a reader cares about is that he is worried about his son's developmental problems, is mad at his wife, and secretly ashamed of the business his family is in. The universality of the human experience is what good writing is about, and the very best way to get at that is to watch real people and yes, sometimes use real people in stories.

If you think that you are so incredibly brilliant that you can literally simulate five or ten people as complex, as deep, as conflicted and fucked up and beautiful as five random people you meet on a bus all in your own head and print out their behaviors like the output of a computer program, you are both deluded and in the wrong line of business.

Really great characters grow out of parts of us, but they need the complexity than can only be achieved by observing real people in the real world. The closer to a real person, the better the character.

Don't listen to people with their theories about how "real people wouldn't fight a threat or do really interesting things" because A: they absolutely do in real life, and B: the EVENT or THING is not the interesting part about a good story, it is how the PERSON we are following reacts to it. What kinds of stories really grab us and pull us in? Would you say Transformers is better than Breaking Bad because the characters are more obviously clear cut and don't get distracted by too much "real world style" complexity? If so, I really pity you. No matter what the characters are doing or where they are, that grounding in what real people really would do is what gives them the realism to allow a reader to suspend their disbelief, forget about whether a fire breathing dragon could ever really exist, and just get lost in the psychic pain of the knight watching him make for the town his family lives in, knowing he has no way to stop him in time.

EDIT: Mark Twain based Huckleberry Finn on Tom Blankenship. "In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was." Virtually EVERY character in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" is based directly on a real person. Severus Snape was based on a real teacher Rowling had. William Faulkner based many, many characters on real people. So did Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises is 100% based on real people). Steinbeck based Adam Trask on a neighbor, John Green based The Fault In Our Stars on a real person he met at a Harry Potter convention, Everything Pat Conroy ever wrote was based on real people.

I'll go into a little detail just on Hemingway; After The Sun Also Rises, he was criticized by John Don Passos for basing characters too much on real people. He reacted by satirizing this style of writing in Torrents Of Spring (which was much less successful). His friend F Scott Fitzgerald maintained that basing characters on real people was the right way to go and he did this extensively in his own novels. Hemingway continued to do so, though not as transparently as in Sun Also Rises "the way a painter will use a model" according to most people who studied his work.

Allow me to quote from a textbook here (Fiction Writing Master Class: Emulating the Work of Great Novelists to Master the Fundamentals of Craft by William Cane.) "Was Hemingway cheating by using real people as the basis of characters for his fiction? Or was he doing what all great artists do, including portrait painters like John Singer Sargent, N.C. Wyeth, and Norman Rockwell? How you answer this question reveals a lot about your maturity as a writer. ... **Every great writer from Tolstoy to Flaubert to Hemingway to today's heavyweights uses real people as the model for fictional characters.** Some beginning writers fear basing fictional characters on real people... ...some writers don't know how to base characters on real people. ...Don't write stories about totally made-up people. Base characters on people you know and your stories will spring from an undercurrent of reality that can't fail to move readers."

If you REALLY think that a totally made up character based on an archetype is going to be more universally appealing than the Great Gatsby, Severus Snape, or Huckleberry Finn, you go right ahead, but you are literally flying in the face of the methods of all of the most revered novelists of the last two centuries. Just sayin...

Original score: 6