Warning: this blog post contains links to tvtropes, a website known to be harmful to your health (and productivity).

My name is Phoebe, and I’m here today to make a confession: when it comes to crafting dynamic, interesting, and lively characters, I cheat.

You might ask how one cheats at fiction. While I’m not exactly a plagiarist–my prose and conceits are always my own–I can’t really say that’s true for the people in my books, especially in my first drafts.

You see, when I need to create a secondary character, rather than inventing a new person from whole cloth (which is hard!), I usually just turn to my favorite fiction-writing tool in the whole wide world: television.

Or movies. Or youtube videos. Or to memories of people I knew at some far-distant time. Basically, I lift characters from another, completely different situation. I think about the way they move, the way they speak, the sort of dynamics they have when interacting with other characters. And then I file the serial numbers off, change the character’s name, give them a fitting back story, and plop them down in my world.

For example, one of the love interests in my current project, Daughter of Earth, is Koen Adler, a rail-thin teenage boy with straight, tousled hair, very round eyes, and a maniacally wide smile. He’s a little awkward and a little frenetic.

He’s also pretty much a young David Tennant. Basically, my “research” for his character involved watching a whole bunch of videos of this guy:

Now, that’s not to say that Koen Adler is littleradge. He’s Koen Adler! He was raised on a spaceship and has big, hidden secrets and doesn’t have a Scottish accent because Scotland doesn’t exist in my future (sorry, Scotland).

In anime fandom, this kind of character is usually referred to as an expy–an export of one character moved to an entirely new franchise or universe. And it’s not thought of as an entirely good thing. It’s lazy. It’s derivative. It’s fanficky. And I get that. It’s so much purer to create entirely new people.

But for me it’s not always really necessary on first drafts. First drafts are where I bang out the beats of my book. Since I’m a pantser, they’re where I figure out the plot. And so I don’t always need a completely unique, stunningly new character. I just need someone who I can see, who is defined enough to do the stuff I want them to do.

Of course these characters grow and change in writing them. Hell, just by putting them in a new environment, and giving them a different backstory, their characterization changes. But I’ve found that filching characters is a terrific short-cut to character creation.

Sometimes I try to build my characters from scratch. And while it occasionally works, it often leads to people who are flat or understated. For example, Daughter of Earth‘s narrator is a girl named Terra, and all of the other Interrobangs wanted her to be more active and better defined in my next draft. Frankly, I was stymied. Nothing I invented felt right. Until I saw The Kids Are all Right and spotted skinny, long-haired Mia Wasikowska drunkenly hooking up at a party. Something about her sadness and the slouch of her long-limbed body was perfect. I’d found my Terra!

When it comes down to it, I figure, why reinvent the wheel? Both our real lives and other media are filled with vital, interesting people–who might fit in perfectly in the universe you’ve crafted. So the next time you’re struggling with a character, consider stealing one.