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Racism is a common flaw, both real and imaginary. In The Lord of the Rings there are plenty of "racist" comments, particularly between the elves and dwarves. In the game Valkyria Chronicles the...
It is completely unproblematic, if real people are part of the world that your fictional characters inhabit. For example, your detective Smith might see President Trump on tv and hear part of a spe...
This is a perfectly reasonable way to name your character and introduce the name with a little backstory. Some people will call it cheesy. Some people will say that it lacks originality. But all ...
Sure! You'd be surprised how many great fictional characters were based on people the author met, people interesting enough we idiomatically call them "characters".(Well, maybe you wouldn't be surp...
Characters can be based on real people. John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Hitler: real life leaders, gangsters, royalty, heroes and villains. There are several p...
It very much depends on what you mean by "real people". You can, of course, make people from history into characters in fiction, as writers of historical novels do, and you can base characters on p...
There are two things that every fictional character needs to be likable: a clear motivation or goal and a distinct voice or personality that comes through their actions and dialogue. Real people a...
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 spend...
First, as others have noted, real people's lives are rarely as event-filled as the lives of fictional characters. For example, Howard Carter became a world-renowned archaeologist when he discovered...
My experience is that "real people" don't make good characters in their original form. Many of my fictitious characters are idealized versions of real ones. They are decidedly better than their ori...
Personally I believe the reason not to use real people in fiction is very simple: the writer already knows them too well. When you write about a person that you know first-hand, it is very difficu...
I will suggest a slightly different reason than others. Specifically, one of the problems we have with reality is that it is sometimes unbelievable or formulaic. Modern politics in many Western cou...
Originality isn't contained merely in what populates your fantasy world. In fact, I'd say that's one of the least important elements to an original story. You can have a new, fresh, original story ...
In colloquial American English, it’s become common to use they for an individual of unknown gender, so this probably would not sound strange to a Millennial or younger. I think, if hermaphrodites ...
If those topics are necessary a-priori knowledge to understand your reasoning then you should expect your readers to know the basics. If you can't expect them to know what you are talking about t...
As it's 2018, you can potentially let your reader choose how they prefer it, through some humble assistance from an online publishing partner. Anyone skilled in the computer science discipline of N...
You can't get your audience to root for a character they fundamentally don't like. If you try you risk running into the Designated Hero trope where the only reason we are expected to treat a chara...
Not So Good Guy as Protagonist You may find some value in looking up the anti-hero or even villain tropes. Having murk in your story which prevents people from easily deciding who is right and who...
David Weber uses a consistent convention in his Honor Harrington books where the speaker uses their own gendered pronoun to refer to someone else when they don't know their gender. (Even if the rea...
Despite the rest of the answers giving very valid points, I'd like to add that you can always invent your own expression that doesn't necessarily have to conform to any predefined standards. The e...
Everything in a story has to matter. If you write alternate history, the alternate has to matter to the story. If you put in a detail that is obviously and deliberately contrary to history (as oppo...
What is your purpose in wanting to do this? If the story is 99% set in the real world, and then you throw in this one paragraph of alternate history, and then the story goes back to the real world...
You have a number of options: If the narrator of the book is a human, it would be entirely acceptable to use "he" or "she" (no point in switching between them) throughout the book as standard, wi...
One solution is to keep the protagonist from even knowing the answer. Make the project a kind of an exploration and discovery so small accomplishments accumulate to larger things, that suddenly coa...
Unlike the engineered hermaphroditic humans in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan universe, who might be speaking a future version of English, your hermaphrodites are an alien species and do not spe...
