Characters--where do they come from?

Here it is Week #3. I send my regrets for not attending this week. Hugh/Eric, I will read your piece again when I can and send my comments to you sometime this week.
         As to characters--it feels like an organic process for me. I have ideas--sometimes just a title and then as I learn more about what it is I might or might not use I let the characters come to me and tell me what they want to say. These people in this piece have been around for many years but only in the last two have they bothered to separate from me and tell me what they want. They are sometimes from people I have met; from experiences I have had or things I have seen read or written in the past. I like the fact that the group requested that I make each of these characters "real" and "alive." Michelle, that helped me to make connections in the back stories that I didn't know before. And so what you tell me affects what happens in all three scenes--so it keeps evolving.
        I feel like a biographer. It is a bit schizoid but then the other seventy-three of us don't seem to have a problem in here. 
        For anyone who is interested--one of the members of the Firesign Theatre, Peter Bergman, passed away from Leukemia on March 9, 2012. The game show that I had originally wanted to use is from Firesign Theatre "Beat the Reaper." Go to this site to see/hear a cut of this and other off the wall and wonderfully punny stuff:
             Peter Bergman 1939 - 2012. 
I will not be using that particular game show--but that is the idea behind the game I want to use. Thanks to you Hugh/Eric about what questions to use--that has sent me off in another direction.
Okay, gotta fly.
Evam