Where Fiction Intersects Reality

Eleanor Hanssler

Staff Writer

In 1977, John E. Douglas invented the method of profiling when working for the FBI. This technique involves intently observing a person or environment in order to decipher the criminal's major personality and behavioral traits, among other clues that could help to solve a crime. As someone who’s main creative outlet is writing stories and creating characters, I’d say that I find inspiration through profiling of my own.

When it comes to writing and creating characters, the most important thing is to make sure that they’re both believable and relatable. Characters should have their own strengths and weaknesses, along with habits and quirks, just like real life people. The easiest way to do this is by pulling traits from those you know in your actual life, realistically combining them on pen and paper.

In the first story I ever wrote, all the way back in first grade, the main character was myself, placed straight into the middle of the Magic Treehouse book series. Since then, the characters I’ve created have become much more complex, no longer just a direct copy of real people but fictional people that could stand on their own. My classmate’s habit of running her hand through the end of her hair absentmindedly combined with a cousin’s love of music created a character lost in his own mind compiling the different keys on a piano to create a harmonic melody of notes.

Over time, I’ve begun to perform this process in reverse, looking at strangers I see at the table across from me in a restaurant or the cashier at the grocery store. I try to figure out what kind of person they might be, what their main conflict is, whether they sit back and watch as life unfolds around them or if they try to be the one turning the pages. Profile them, in a sense, although not for the same reasons as the FBI.

Years of English class have ingrained a plot map template in my mind, starting with the exposition and call to action and ending with the denouement. Character archetypes stand out to me, the shapeshifter mixing with the herald mixing with the mentor. Man vs. Nature. Man vs. Man. Man vs. Society. Man vs. Self. Maybe the woman in the car in front of me is trying to teach her daughter the difference between right and wrong and is struggling internally with feeling like a competent parent. We don’t necessarily view this as a Mentor role or a Man vs. Self conflict, but this is how I would view it in a story.

Every now and then, when I find myself so lost imagining the life and traits of a stranger, based only on outward cues like their slumped posture or seldom worn tennis shoes, I take the person out of reality and try to place them in a fictional setting. Sometimes the setting is somewhere whimsical; other times it is a city that could easily be found in our own world. But take this person, create other characters that add to the conflict and enhance the plot, and a story has been created in my mind.

For some, profiling helps solve a case or locate a serial killer. But for me, profiling inspires me to create the people within the story, also allowing me to branch out in creating the worlds and conflicts in a way that can properly resonate both with myself as the writer as well as with the reader. In this way, writing stories and creating characters can serve not only as a creative outlet to express myself, but also those I come across in my everyday world.