Though some of my characters start life as versions of people I have known, they rarely remain those persons for long. They grow, they change, becoming original characters in almost all respects. One might dig and uncover their origins, but it won’t tell one much about them.
And, of course, the work is fiction. I dictate its course, not people with whom I might or might not have interacted, sometime in the past. I don’t want to write about those people. They are only a starting point.
It does have to be admitted that using a real-life model can make a character more believable. Some of the developmental work has already been done. The mistake would be trying to stick with that grounding when the character is ready to take flight.
