Continuing the discussion of writing techniques I am curious about the use of personas to assist your character development.

I find that I need to develop the character fairly well before I can write about them with congruence.  Is this the same for you?

Lets begin by describing the process of develping a persona because you may do this but think of it in a different way or by a different way.

Personas are used by writers and marketing people alike.  The concept is very simple, if you have a well defined persona you will be able to better understand the character and write either to them, if you are a marketer, or about them if you are a writer.  Even if you are writing as if the story is being told by the persona you still need to have a pretty good idea of how they will think, react, talk and generally behave.

I’m sure that makes sense to you so how do you develop this?  Marketers and writers actually come at this from opposite directions.  Marketers look at the product and try to gather information about the most likely age and sex of the typical customer.  Once they have that data they then do as much research as possible to clarify the most likely customer and then get a picture of someone who fits the profile, give them a name and then keep that in front of them as they write their marketing copy.

Writers generally start with the age, sex, name and location (home, town, school etc.) of their character and then add detail to fill out the character.  They will add details like family, pets, friends, where he/she got that little scar on the knee, how often they jog, swim etc.  All of these details go into making up a solid and more believable persona so when they write they seem to come alive and become real people, or aliens in the case of Science Fiction.

A little like Douglas Adams’ “little furry things from Alpha Centuri were REAL little furry things from Alpha Centuri” believabilty comes from the author having that belief and being able to write about what appears to be real people even if they are writing fiction about fictional people.  That belief can only come from writing about solidly built personas unless you are writing biographical works.  Although even then you will have to do very good research to fill out the characters unless you are writing about real people you know.  Some of them might not like that much.

It has been reported that authors friends and relatives often see bits of themselves in the finshed work.  Authors say thet they don’t deliberately do that but obviously they will use characteristics that they know well in the characters they write about.

Back to the original question.  Do you use personas in your writing?  How do you develop them?  Do you have photographs or other images of these personas nearby when you write?

The other thing that seems to be pretty common amongst Science Fiction and Fantasy writers is to have a map of the country or territory that the story is set in.  They add this to the book so the readers are able to follow the travels of the characters as they go about their quests etc.  This is also a type of persona.

The more real you can make it the better the reader experience and the better the acceptance of your work.

What are your thoughts on this?