A fellow writer recently asked me about one of my villains. She wanted to know how I manage to write the character so well when she's a real twisted bitch. She was curious as to where the character came from--personal experience, fantasy, or a twisted imagination. While all of these have a part in the character to some degree, the one thing that really comes into play when creating characters isn’t on the list: the influence of others.

Some time back, I played role-playing games. I was fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough, depending on your point of view) to have some pretty twisted GM's who made some pretty nasty bad guys. Their NPC's were pretty twisted too, come to think of it. Nothing was ever straight forward with these characters. There was always something more going on beneath the surface--some hidden motivation, some manipulation you didn’t see coming, some plot being worked out behind the scenes. I also can’t tell you how many times I fell into their traps, despite being pretty savvy. These GM's showed me how to watch player behavior and character behavior and use it to my advantage. And when I became a GM myself, they showed me how to build twisted, devious characters of my own. Much later, when I started working on my writing more seriously, I took the lessons learned into my story characters as well.

Now some would say that a gaming influence is a bad influence on writing, and I've definitely had to learn how to edit my experiences as a player and GM. For example, I may love being a description queen, but even I will concede that a GM describing a room to his or her players needs to use far more description than a writer needs in a novel. I've had to learn to tone it down, but I would never say the gaming influence on my description was a bad one. If anything, I learned more about paying attention to details.

Writers should never turn away from an experience because it's a "bad" influence. If an experience is harmful and causes pain, some distance may be needed before that experience can be used in writing, if it ever can be, but writers should otherwise endeavor to soak up their influences. Everything we experience, from the situations in our lives to the personalities we meet, is fodder for the imagination. Passing something by because it's not acceptable, or it's not "appropriate" for writing, or whatever other reason given for it being bad, only reduces the material you have as a writer to work with. How can you create wonderfully deep, twisted characters if you haven't seen other wonderfully deep twisted characters either real or imagined? We are the sum of our experiences. When we deny ourselves the use of those experiences in our writing, we deny a part of ourselves, and our writing suffers for it.

Soaking up the influences in your life helps you to add color and depth to your writing that would otherwise not be there. It allows you to create characters who are so different from yourself that readers wonder how you write them so well.