Motivational-type speakers say you’re like the five closest people you surround yourself with. People who take this at bumper-sticker-deep philosophy generally mean this as an encouragement to spend more time with people who are exactly like who we want to be, or who are our picture of success.
Instead, I’m going to posit: your characters are the sum of the people you spend time with. See the header quote by Robert E Howard. So get to know interesting people.
J.L. Curtis based his Grey Man on several people he’s met over the years – some of them former marines who he shot with, and one of them a gent I was lucky enough to know before he passed, who was a quiet, slow-talking gentleman who was easy to overlook… and if you did, you’d miss a legend.
As for me, well, it’s no secret that I managed to go a few places and do a few things before my health caught up to me. (Don’t breathe volcanic ash from inside the cloud, nor drive through a forest fire and pop out the flame front, meeting the startled hotshot crews digging a fireline. Bad for your lungs!) And I had the amazing good fortune to meet and marry a man who’s been other places and done enough things to positively revel in the quiet life we have now.
But what if you can’t tap a subject matter expert by the simple dint of going “Love?” or by showing up to dinner with deviled eggs, a topo map, and a willingness to shut up and listen? Well, thankfully, there are memoirs and podcasts. I particularly like long-form podcasts that are visually as well as verbally recorded, because body language conveys so much more, not only in information, but in the physical beats that go into the story. Not only that, but long form allows the interviewer and subject to stray off topic… and the little asides are where the ingredients for true verisimilitude live.
I recommend avoiding documentaries until you know enough about the subject to see the bias and the holes… because documentaries are stories that weave facts together to fit the story the director wanted to tell. If you start with them, you swallow fact and fiction together as a whole, usually with the emotional yanking of a background score, and then you have to work at unlearning slant and bias you didn’t even realize you had.
One you can understand that it’s a partial, carefully selected story of history, they’re quite useful at giving you a rich visual context for the whole world in which the individual stories are set… and even then, I often like to pick a non-US documentary, as the cultural biases are different, and therefore easier to recognize even on unfamiliar subject material.
But you don’t have to set out to research someone – by dint of exposure, you’re exposing yourself to people every time you open up youtube or tiktok, that true crime podcast you like on spotify, the cool people with the horses on instagram… granted, you’re only seeing of them what they want you to see, heavily edited and aired for maximum likes/clicks, but it’s still exposure to people who are different from you.
Pay attention, and you may be surprised what your characters will be and do.
Mad Genius Club 
2 responses to “The five closest people…”
All experience is good, even if it’s vicarious. When I ended up in Virginia around the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley for several years, I managed to plug in to the Foxhunting community (after an initial contact via a Sacred Harp singing meet — life is amusing). Hubby and I were ex-very-minor riders and not in health to resume the activity (at the time), but we were sportsmen.
So, for several years, we car-followed the foxhunts (a very possible activity – see Rita Mae Brown, who was in the area). I took up semi-pro hunt photography for the hunts in the area (klmimages.com) We got to know the primary activities and all the ancillary ones (Dog shows, Point-to-Points, Hunt Balls, Kennel management, Masters vs Landowners, Masters vs Hunt Staff, Rural scandals, etc., etc.). I picked up a French Basset hound from a Rabbit-hunting foot-pack. In other words, we were immersed in an entire way of life and had a place in it that I would have loved to maintain (employment pressures killed it, alas).
There’s a reason my first series involves a Virginia huntsman who finds himself drafted to hunt the Hounds of Hell for the Wild Hunt. All those characters (and all the activity minutiae) are heavily informed by my experience.
My parents’ anecdotes about working in places where you need to know someone who knows someone to get anything done underlie some of my books about places like that.