Once you have the initial idea for a character, the process of developing that character into a complex, real personality begins — and the starting point is always research.
The general context of a character means filling in all the facts about the where, when, why, and how this person exists in the world of your story.
Stage One: Start With What You Know
In the first stage of general research, begin with what you already know. Personal experiences and observations are the natural launching pad for exploring a character’s circumstances.
Your hometown is a ready-made world. You know how the air smells, when the sun sets, how the locals talk and move. Those specific details — the ones only someone who lived there would know — are what give a fictional world its texture and truth.
Garrison Keillor built an entire fictional universe from his Minnesota roots. His long-running radio program A Prairie Home Companion featured a weekly segment called “News from Lake Wobegon” — dispatches from a fictitious Minnesota town described as “the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve… where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” The humor, the specific cultural references to Scandinavian-American and German-American communities — all drawn from lived experience. The detail rings true because it is true.
The same principle applies to the people around your character. If your protagonist has three best friends, use your own friends as seeds of inspiration. You already know how they react under pressure, what makes them laugh, how they move through a room. That knowledge produces believable, specific character behavior — the kind that can’t be manufactured from research alone.
Using what you know doesn’t limit your story. It grounds it.