They're Already Inside You

I have a very good feeling about my comics because whenever I show them to people, they laugh. More importantly, they make me and my friend (who does the art) laugh. Whenever he reads my scripts, he laughs out loud from them. I often get the question from him, "how do you think of these things?"

Honestly, most of the time I have no idea. How is it that I can write the voice of pretentious, self-centered pricks and backwoods dimwits? How do I say the thing just fits a character right? I don't think about it much. I just stare into space and it pops into my head.

The only conclusion is that the characters already exist inside of me. Authors often say that your characters are all a part of you, but I think it is that you are a part of all your characters. I have never lived in the back woods. The closest I've ever come to living in the south is Ft. Lauderdale. Florida may be southern, but it is not The South. Similarly, I've never lived in a major metropolitan area where I was a spoiled brat. So this makes me ask, if these characters already exist inside me, but I have never lived their lives, where did they come from?

Most of them I have absorbed from observation. I was surrounded by pompous assholes in college, so I learned how they talked and acted because there was nothing else to do. I've never been surrounded by hicks, though, so that is a little different. Sometimes a character is just a toned-down caricature. Take a bunch of stereotypes of any group of people, but scale them back enough for them to be believable humans; now you have a character. Similarly, you can start with basic pretenses or concepts of a character, and then just flesh them out with experience and logic.