A few of your comments in the previous entry have mentioned the idea of characters becoming real, so real that they take up residence in the brain like other living people in the author’s life. So I want to ask: if you’re a writer, how real do your characters get? This overlaps a bit with the previous thread, but it’s something I’ve heard authors talk about in different venues and I’ve always wondered about it.
Many authors state that the characters they write become so real to them that these fictional creations take on wills of their own and, depending on the language used by the author, demand control of their own stories, and inform the author how those stories will end. One author said that she didn’t expect to write about certain events in her novel, but the characters made her do it, and in the end she thought their decisions were the right ones.
LKH steps beyond characters coming to life during the writing process, and writes:
My characters are real to me in a way that makes me miss them. For God’s sake, I’ll be in the mall and see something, and go, “Oh, it’s the perfect gift for (fill in the blank).” I’ve been in line with the present in my hand, before I go, “Wait, these are make believe people. I can’t buy them a Christmas present.” I guess I could, but there’s no way to give it to them. They aren’t THAT real. But they are real enough that I see things that make me think of them in the way you think of a boyfriend or a husband, or a best friend.
I know that every writer’s process is different, and there are some that don’t even look at the process analytically for fear it will curl up in a fetal position and run away from the scrutiny. I know some writing instructors posit that an author should be able to say without thinking about it what items are in a character’s pockets at any moment, even if those items are not germane to the story. The author should have such an intimate knowledge of his or her character creations that the contents of their underwear drawer are known and easily cataloged. And I don’t meant the knickers themselves. I mean the stuff hidden under the knickers.
As a writer, are your characters real? How real? Do they tell you what to do once you’ve created them? Is there a moment when they take control of the story and you follow them as they lead the way to the end? And what’s on their Amazon Wish List?
Kasey Michaels’ Maggie books feature a herione who writes Regency mysteries and wakes up one morning to find that her hero is so fully-realized that he and his loveable sidekick have materialized in her apartment
Hmm. I wrote a romantic comedy screenplay with this same premise. I got the idea from the Kate Bush song “Sensual World.”
I guess there are no original ideas left, but mine was a male romance writer and had an existentialist twist, FWIW.
Ohhh, RacyLi!
She writes “kickass ninja smut” (that’s her slogan on her site).
Go ahead and roll that one in your mouth for a second. Kickass. Ninja. Smut.
It’s been my addiction for the past week!
And yes, characters take you for a ride sometimes, but *I* am the one with the delete key.
MWA HA HAAA!!
There were two moments in working on Doppelganger (both occurring in the same night of writing) when the characters said and did things I had NOT planned—things which ultimately made the story better and set up the ending to be cooler than it would have been otherwise, though I didn’t realize that until I got there and saw how those two changes fit in.
Of course, when I say that, it’s shorthand for saying that my subconscious took some unexpected turns based on its understanding of the characters and its intuition of what would be cool for the story. I don’t believe the characters have some objective reality independent of me. When the characters “come to life,” it’s my subconscious taking the wheel, and it frequently has better ideas than my conscious does. I wish I could make that happen more often.
Mind you, in the first of those two instances, it literally felt like the character looked up at me out of the scene running in my head and said, “Wrong.” (If anybody here has read the book, Satomi was the one who did it, and that’s the exact word she uses on the page, too. Page 293? That’s my skin trying to crawl off my neck.) Weird feeling, and that’s why I will use language that suggests my characters do have minds of their own. Sometimes it feels just like that.
For a cross-medium comparison, I’ve also had similar experiences in role-playing games, when I was thinking so clearly as my character, rather than as myself, that I made perfect in-character decisions without ever having to consider them. When I’m writing, though, I’m usually having to keep too many people in my mind at once for it to be as frequent of an occurrance.
I’ll consider things like what music or food a character likes, and do online quizzes or memes in-character, as a mental exercise; sometimes it’s a useful way to lead myself toward the reality they need. Because they do need to feel real, or nobody, myself included, will care what happens to them.
I think (hope?) LKH’s comments play to a marketing strategy: “Come join my crazysexycool world. I think it’s real.
You think it’s real, too, and I’ll spend your money.”
“No, no, NO!! Not the evil little dolls. Not them. They have evil little weapons. It’s always a knife. Evil little dolls with knives ARE real. I know. They’re under my bed just waiting for my arm or leg to fall over the edge while I sleep so they can hack at me.
Otherwise, it’s all pretend.”
I hate to tell you this, Nora, but “Trilogy of Terror” was based on REAL EVENTS! Yes, the writer who wrote this believed so fervently in the stories (even to the point of knowing that the Karen Black character had a piece of Dentyne, two pennies, and a “Fire & Ice” Revlon lipstick in her pocket, loved Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” and was on her first day of ovulation, that the characters materialized.
Where are they now? They’ll be featured on a VH-1 special, “One Hit Monster Wonders” along with Chuckie, the thing from “Alien,” and Linda Blair.
Nora, please keep Galahad safe.
I think any three-dimentional character is going to bear a level of reality. Otherwise, they won’t be real to the reader. And if you write a series, you do get to know them so well you can tell what they’d do in a given situation.
I’m having new covers made for the first two books in my trilogy because the concept we used for the first two won’t work for the third. It seems perfectly natural to tell the artist that Character A wouldn’t wear that—and why.
I’m driving this car, usually very fast on some cliffside roads not meant for racing. I joke that I’m not a very nice God to my characters and my roommate agrees. “You sure do turn up the tension on them,” she told me after reading my galley. But doing that helps me get reactions from characters. Knowing how they react to fear, pain, loss helps me learn them.
I also compare learning about them to dating. I write a bit and feel them out for their fashion sense, politics, whatever. And by the end I create someone I believe could exist even though he or she does not exist in reality.
When I’m really in the trenches writing I will have dreams about my characters. They keep me up at night. But I’ve never contemplated buying them presents. I never thought much about what was in their pockets (unless it was important to the story). And while I’m a little sad to say goodbye to some of them I’m also happy in that “man it’s nice to see the backside of my family after a long visit” sort of way.
P.S. Nora, I killed a dog in my book and when my aunt who just put hers down said, “You don’t kill any dogs in your book, do you?” I blithely said yes before remembering I did slaughter an imaginary dog. Bad author!
Everybody’s already knee-deep in this…I feel…late…Oh well.
I admit I have a problem with reading about animals being harmed in books and yes, I do know they’re pretend animals. It’s just very uncomfortable. That didn’t stop me from having a dog die in my WIP. It was a very sweet, very sad death of an elderly dog and she went to heaven.
But as far as characters go. I started this last WIP out with a man and a woman in a park at night. They were about to get ‘romantic’ across the picnic table when a third character came running across the park interrupting everything and changing the entire course of the WIP. I didn’t invite him. I hadn’t been planning him. He just arrived with his teenage son, a wife and a gun collection. He took over everything.
I did one of those character questionaire things but it was a waste of time – I already knew everything about him. It is very weird how that happened. This guy is very real to me. But he didn’t make it on my christmas list. For one thing because if I buy a firearm for anybody it’s going to be me (that’s what he would want) and he has plenty already; plus he’s not real. We both know he’s not real.
Reading this particular section of comments was interesting, mostly because 2 of my favorite authors commented. I love this site. LOL! 🙂
I will say that being a nonpublished author, I’ve had characters say and do things that I didn’t expect. To me, that means I’ve gotten to know them well enough to figure out what they wanted. I can’t imagine thinking a character was real, but I’m too much of a realist I guess. 🙂
Oops, put this on the wrong post! Anyway, to repeat myself:
—E said: My characters walk onto the page more or less fully-formed. I say “more or less†because I don’t know them yet, but if I turn my attention on them, everything is already there.
I write like this, too. My characters know the beginning and the end of the story – it’s up to them to tell of the journey. Of course, they’ll give me a gimlet eye if I get it wrong and refuse to move on, but that’s as real as it gets. Once the book/story is done, that’s it, there is nothing else to say (which is why I love a happy ending). I move on to the next project, and the characters happily stay in the world I’ve created for them. (They’d be embarrassed if I bought stuff for them.)
As for LKH’s refusal to kill the whiney-assed, clingy, must-have-Anita’s- protection-because-no-one-else-is-strong-enough, girly-men characters, because they’re so real to her, well, she doesn’t have to kill them off (much as I’d like to see mass slaughter and Anita back on her lonesome at Animators Inc.), exile, prison, punishment, interstate, inter-space(!) would suit just as well.
Maybe the cover art for LKH’s next book should be a picture of Anita with a sign hanging around her neck – with arrows pointing to every orifice – saying: Sperm Bank, Deposit Here! Open 24/7! Then we won’t have to read it; we’ll already know what the book’s about.
If nothing else, LKH has taught us how not to write.
“No, no, NO!! Not the evil little dolls. Not them. They have evil little weapons. It’s always a knife. Evil little dolls with knives ARE real. I know. They’re under my bed just waiting for my arm or leg to fall over the edge while I sleep so they can hack at me.
Otherwise, it’s all pretend.”
I hate to tell you this, Nora, but “Trilogy of Terror” was based on REAL EVENTS!
OMG… After watching Trilogy of Terror as a teenager I still cannot hang my feet or hand over my bed. Little dolls and those clapping monkeys … shutter…..
I am not a writer and bow down to those with the talent to apply your imagination in a coherent fashion for a story. It has been so interesting to read about your relationships/thoughts on your characters.
I don’t find it wrong for an author to feel invested in their characters. But when someone does not like your character/story I assume most sane authors would say “OH well” and chalk it up to differences in opinion.
LKH does not seem able to take what she does for a living out of who she is. When fans say I hate you, I hate Anita, I hate blah, blah, blah, they don’t know you. They only know what your writing ability and imagination have produced. Your “public” persona if you will. When you start to react as if they are attacking you personally then probably you have self esteem problems/mental issues. What you do (writer) is a huge part of who you are, but I assume most have the common sense to separate your personal life from the author that you are.
Nora, your reaction to cat women seems appropriate. Having humor at the sitation is justified, but LKH’s mode of operation would have her and her assistants writing scathing blog entries to fans about how she loves cats and we are stupid because we didn’t understand that cats are really important to her and spouting how many people are buying the cat killer book and … well you get the point.
When authors reach past believing in characters to protecting them publicly like mother bears, you are probably going far.
At the risk of being pushed into the “crazy” pile, I basically just have about a million people living in my head and the one that’s the most vocal at present, well, I write down their story for them. Sometimes it almost feels like I’m taking dictation for these people and they’re not my creations at all.
No, they don’t get Christmas presents from me and they don’t tell me go to go steal Cheese Whiz and hide it under my Noche Buena tree in the garden, but I am emphatically NOT in charge. They tell their stories; I write them down. That’s more or less the process. Outlining for me is straight out because I often don’t know what’s coming next until I start writing. That makes it especially fun, sometimes, and completely organic.
Sometimes that creates a mess, but I’m good at making revisions and I have lovely crit partners. The people living in my head don’t seem to mind my tinkering with their stories once I’ve laid them out in rough form, as instructed, and it’s generally with very good results. I don’t know anymore about my characters, however, than what they tell me as we go along.
If you insist, I’ll go stand in the loopy line now…
I’m SOOOO glad to know I’m not the only one out there who has to learn about her characters as she writes. My hero and heroine, yeah, I usually have a semi-decent understanding of them, but they’re not fully formed at all…I get an idea, and then sit down and pound the keyboard until they’re happy.
Heck, most of the time I don’t figure out my villain until I’m at least halfway through the manuscript, then have to go back and lay THAT foundation. It does make them a ton more fun to write about, tho *g*. I’ve tried outlining, character profiles, the whole nine yards, but my characters always throw me for a loop by doing some small (at the time, seemingly inconsequential) thing that ends up bumping the storyline to the left or right, and inevitably makes it better. Which is why I don’t torture my critique partners until the damned thing is done! LOL.
Oh, and I’d better have the right music, otherwise it all comes to a screeching standstill. I may be in the mood to write to blues, but if my heroine wants to hear Disturbed, she’s not gonna say a peep until the iPod is thrashing.
The huge drawback (obviously) is that writing a synopsis before I finish the manuscript is basically a waste of time (sigh)…
Music is pretty huge for me too. When I was writing Falling, a darker sci-fi romance, I listened to nothing but Placebo for some reason. That wasn’t the heroine’s doing (as far as I know!), but it just felt right. That book was the first one I wrote from first word to last without having an idea, character concepts, plotline, nothing(!) pre-planned before I started. I was working on something else at the time, actually, and it wasn’t going well, so I thought:
“And now for something completely different.”
It was meant to be an exercise more than anything else to get the juices flowing. I sat down to write with an empty mind and Falling was the result. Interesting sidenote, I actually didn’t have a clue I was almost done with it until like two chapters before the end. I was up to 85K words, going, Huh, wonder how all this is going to turn out when things took a twist, the heroine showed me the light, and we wrapped it up. I’m insanely proud of that book.
I’ll throw my sombrero into the ring, along with everybody else.
I do need to get to know my characters, and sometimes this will involve finding out minutae about who they are and what they do and do not like. Usually, those details come to me without warning. For the most part, however, I’m in control of who they are and what they want.
As invested as I get in my characters, as important as it is for me to like them as people and want to tell their stories, I have never confused them for actual people. I may feel sad if a proposal I wrote didn’t go anywhere and I don’t get to bring a certain character to life, but I don’t go into mourning. Granted, I have not written a character whose story spans more than one book, so perhaps that might cause me to form more of an attachment to them, but I have a hard time imagining myself buying one of my heroines a sweater from Nordstrom, or picking up a six pack of Negro Modelo for my hero. I don’t think I am skilled enough to fool *myself* into believing that my characters are real people, when an outline and many rewrites prove that there is a tremendous effort involved in their creation.
For me, there is a certain amount of “channeling” involved when it comes to writing, but I can’t help wonder if the insistence that the characters live on their own somehow devalues the work of the author. It seems as though it guts a critical element of the skill of writing, that a writer can create a fully rounded individual from the strength of their ability, and then manipulate them through the fictive world in such a way that the manipulation is seamless. Maybe some authors do have characters “tell” them what to do. Maybe some authors are just Ouija boards and characters and story simply pour through them onto the page. I’m not one of those authors, for good or for ill.
However, I’ve also come to feel that the most important relationship in writing is between the reader and the work. When I was getting my MFA, it was often said in the Workshop that you can’t follow your story around, explaining it to people. Either the work succeeds on its own merits, or it doesn’t. What does all this mean, contextually? It means that I have my theories about writing and process, another author will have hers, but the final determination happens when a reader sits down with a book. All those elegantly described theories mean very little when the book is opened and read. It’s a closed system, and, honestly, I like to keep it that way. Either my characters live for the reader, or they don’t, and if they don’t, I need to figure out why and make the reading experience more involving the next time.
I do hope that I never get to the point where I have to write extended screeds on my websites explaining my rationale. That, to me, means I haven’t succeeded at my job.
I haven’t yet gotten to the point of making character soundtracks for my fiction (the way I do for RPGs), but my characters do occasionally have firm opinions on music. I had to listen to Vivaldi’s “Primavera” on repeat one time, until long past the point when I wanted to scream at the sound of it, because that was the only music that could get me into the headspace of my repressed Victorian main character. And then there was the time I put into one setting a culture whose religion features a lot of ceremonial drumming. I had in mind, y’know, taiko. One group of people in the culture decided that they really liked the beat in Metallica’s “Fuel.” <sigh> Not what I had in mind, but there you go.
OMG…Trilogy of Terror gave me nightmares for YEARS.
This is an excellent point, but as I see it, I’m telling their stories in my words. The way I put the words together, my word choice, my syntax…that’s all mine. My skill, my ability, my gift. If someone else had those exact same characters in her head, she wouldn’t write their story in exactly the same way.
Whether I do my job well or badly is subjective, at least to some degree. What works profoundly for some doesn’t work for others. I don’t get the camp factor of Dara Joy, for instance, but she had a legion of devoted fans. To me, she wasn’t so bad she was good; she was just bad. But others loved the hell out of her stuff. That’s just the way it is, and I think it’s pretty cool to hear about the different ways to people work. I admire the organized writer who can outline down to the smallest detail and stick with that plan all the way to the end but my mind doesn’t work in such an orderly fashion.
Susan Wilbanks said:
Girl, if Captain Jack Harkness turns out to be real, I am there. *g*
This is a very interesting discussion to read, since the only things I’ve written are fanfiction, where some aspects of the character are established onscreen by a collaborative group of people (writer, director, actor, even set decorators), and other aspects are “filled in” by fanfic writers. For example, if a guitar is shown in the background of a character’s bedroom, that’s ground zero for a fic where the character plays that guitar, even though it’s never been depicted onscreen.
Because of this practice of extrapolation, in fanfic circles you find lots of offhand mentions of what media they think certain characters would like, foods they hate (or can’t eat, if an allergy has been established in canon), etc. But even in the fanfic community, which already is considered kind of crazy by lots of people, the folks who speak about characters like they’re real are backed away from slowly, much like you would do when you see a strange dog on the street.
(As an aside, actors, like authors, have to keep their characters in that gray zone where they’re “real” enough to have distinct personalities, but not overpowering to the actor’s person. For example, during a costume fitting for The Talented Mr. Ripley, Jude Law and Matt Damon were being fitted for a single pair of trousers that both characters would wear in turn, and the costume designer said to Law, “You know, these pants hang better if you don’t wear underwear.” Law agreed, and then Damon said, “Whereas Tom [his character] would never not wear underwear.”)
So we’ve established that there are “method writers†just as there are “method actorsâ€. LOL!
While not a writer, per se, I do enjoy writing. And I think that the more real your characters are to you the easier they will be to write because their voices are so much more vivid. However, I do think that a line must be drawn somewhere. They are fictional.
An odd trend in message boards is respecting the characters of the series as well as the author and other board members. Something always seemed a little off to me about respecting someone that was fictional. If I think that Lydia Bennett was freaking idiot who should’ve been tossed into the Thames, I feel that I should be able to voice such criticism.
The overly real characters have appeared in Sherrilyn Kenyon’s world (Acherson does have his own blog) and with JR Ward, whose characters come to her site and occasionally chat with the board members. Okay, I’m enough of a sappy fan that I admit it’s kind of fun. As long as everyone knows that it’s pretend. With truly rabid fangirls, I can never be sure.
In the end I think that it’s whatever works for a particular author while still keeping them out of a psychiatric ward.
Great thread!
Characters—pretty real. I practice method writing in a way, especially toward the last month or so of a book, when it take over my real life. At those times, I’ll often buy groceries as the main character, or bring home some piece of clothing that’s just wrong, wrong, wrong for me—but of course, it’s perfect for the heroine.
I’m usually looking for that point, because then I know it’s all coming together.
As a reader, I’d rather think of an author as a little bit “nutty” in her attachment to her characters than, say, as mean or consdescending.
I understand the anxiety some authors feel in wanting to draw a line between their work as craftspeople and the way characters live in the imagination, but I don’t think it’s necessarily nutty at all for an author to think her characters do live in a parallel universe. When Jennifer Crusie posts pictures of the elaborate boards she makes for her characters, or when she and Bob Mayer talk in their blog about their characters, that seems to me to be sort of a parallel universe for the characaters. After all, isn’t the imagination a parallel universe where each of us can make anything happen? I don’t think readers automatically think, “Wow, that author is batshit for seeing her characters as so multi-dimensional.”
But then I’m an extremely objective reader, so I do much much better when an author reaches out to me with more fully realized characters, as I do not project myself into the world of a novel. I admire readers who are more subjective in their reading experiences, because I think they can connect empathetically to more books than I do, but I’m just not that way. So I respond better and more fully to a character that has been given more dimension by an author’s imagination.
Although I have, on occasion, pretended that a certain author is channeling characters I enjoy (because the author has made a less than stellar impression on me online or something), I don’t really believe that even the most fully realized characters “speak” themselves through the author—it’s very clear to me as a reader how an author is mastering the world her imagination has created, and that she’s the creator on both counts. I commented once on Kinsale’s novels and how I enjoy her books because it feels to me that she’s created this whole world that runs whether I’m observing it or not. As a reader, I get to stand in a doorway and glimpse this world, where Kinsale has focused my attention on a small selection of people who have an interesting story to share at that very moment. Not for one minute do I think Kinsale has actually opened a portal in time, but her mastery of the writing, the characters, and the worldbuilding is so perfect that it *feels* as if she’s done just that. I doubt she shops for her characters, but even if she did, I wouldn’t think she was crazy based on that alone. Now, if she started soliciting reader donations for Christmas presents for her characters . . .
I was discussing this topic with my husband, who is also a writer, last night, and he felt that when authors do things such as listen to music the character might like, see a hat or pair of shoes the character might wear, or connect things in world to the characters, it’s all part of the writing process. If I see a backpack that a character might carry and thing, “Lucy Fictional might carry that bag,” I’m actually *writing*, which is very different from seeing the backpack and buying it, thinking, “Lucy is going to love this bag! I can’t wait to give it to her!” which borders on delusional.
I think my husband is a very smart guy.
Susan wrote:
I tend to talk about my characters as if they’re real, they often surprise me as I write, and I say I have a muse, but deep down I know it’s all in my head.
Hmmm. That might explain why threatening characters with falling mountains, meteors or aliens (the nasty, green-little-buggers sort) doesn’t seem to work.
How real are they to me? I once had a tarot card reading that had bugger-all to do with my life, but was a perfect reading of the character whose book I was pitching the next day at conference.
She gets her own tarot readings. She has her own MySpace. Any minute now we’re going to split down the middle and become two separate people.
I’ll be the one rocking gently in the corner, gibbering to myself.
Sometimes I think about the poor sod who has the job of proof-reading Laurell K. Hamilton’s dreck, and then I’m not entirely surprised at the number of typos and spelling errors which make it through to the final product. I imagine that once you’ve corrected ‘arduer’ to ‘ardeur’ eighty million times, your will to live rather gets sapped.
Seriously. She ruined my favourite trashy series for a plot device SHE CAN’T EVEN SPELL RIGHT? NOT ONCE? Why even bother with French vampires, if one’s French is that atrocious? Why not stick to American vampires, and call it ‘the horny’?
Characters can become very influential in the writing process. If I’m writing from a certain character’s point of view, I pretend that I’m an actor in a movie who is playing that part. That makes it easier to make the character seem more real.
For example, if the character is a well-trained warrior, they’re going to be analytical and cautious when viewing their surroundings. If a character has OCD, they’re not going to trot out of the house without checking all the locks twice and making sure the stove is off.
If you write a character often, they become real in the sense that you kind of feel the story writing itself sometimes. If you try to write something in that’s totally out of character you might hear them say, “Uhm, no way in hell would I blindly charge into a guarded keep in a half-assed rescue attempt. I’m smarter than that.”
Sure, I’ve seen things in the ‘real world’ that remind me of my characters: hot pink rain boots that Janice might wear, a book you might catch Yoh reading. Have I actually tried *purchasing* these things with the intention of giving them to my characters? The answer is a resounding NO.
I once found an inexpensive wall hanging that weirdly matched the description of one on a character’s bedroom wall. I paid $3.50 for it and kept it because of the cool coincidence. Not once did I think that the character would show up to claim it.
Frankly, I think that LKH is lying to make herself seem like a more involved author. The evidence of her connection with her characters is proven through their degradation in the series, not by her claim that she almost buys them presents. If she were truly that in tune with her characters, there wouldn’t be a fuss over Anita turning in to a Vampire Humper in the first place.
This thread actually reminds me of a conversation I had with Terri Pray. She suggested authors do RPGs, because it helps with characterization.
I think that makes sense—my husband does live action roleplaying, and they actually have penalties for breaking character. Not easy when events tend to go for about four days.
Gosh, I can’t wait to get back to my laptop.
I recently took part in a workshop about music and creativity, and the presenter mentioned theta brain waves. When you are taking a shower, or driving a car, or doing the dishes, you are engaged in the activity but only minimally so. The brain shuts down the most active centers of reality-based interaction and basically zones out. I get most of my biggest creative jumps when I take a shower—something about the water noise, the lack of children, the gauranteed alone time. My brain zones out, and the creativity begins.
So when I read this about theta waves, I wondered if that’s why authors claim that the characters take on a life of their own and start to make decisions that stray from the outline. My current heroine is actually a very naughty liar in the skin of a wholesome blind girl—didn’t realize that until I started her. Part of it is the context of the story and trying to make something that stands out successfully as an MS, but the other part of it is being able to successfully access the unconscious level of creativity.
If you buy your characters Christmas presents, you’re crazy. If you just listen more closely to the voices in your head, maybe you’re better in tune with theta waves than other folks.
“I’m SOOOO glad to know I’m not the only one out there who has to learn about her characters as she writes.”
I’m so glad I read this. I didn’t buy Christmas presents for my characters, and they don’t live in real time for me, but I don’t know jack about them until I start typing. One of them “came out” the other night to me! Imagine my surprise. They come to life for me as I write, and I generally go back at the end to make sure they are consistent, because they’ve certainly become richer by the end.
One thing that really pisses me off though is writers and fans who go on about characters as though they are real, “claiming” them as their own man-tale, etc. I’m just grouchy that way.
In regards to the shocking spelling, LKH posted on her blog some time ago (last year?) that she suffered from dyslexia and her daughter had a problem with transposing numbers.
It doesn’t give her any lattitude, though. A good copy editor would have sorted the word stew before it ever got to print.
Ditto, that. I always double-check and go back and sometimes smooth it out, so that a quirk a character revealed on page 188 is consistent from the beginning.
My characters do a alot of crazy things, but my subconscious is cool like that. The only time a character was ever real to me was when I was on acid, but then again, the ceiling was raining stars.
Love this thread.
My characters definitely come to life and do things on their own. Which is a good thing because there are times I’m not sure how I’m really going to find my conclusion (really find it versus the stuff I wrote in the proposal/outline that sold it). Sometimes things happen I didn’t plan at all – like in Goddess of Light my pretend secondary characters decided to have a pretend romance I had no clue was going to happen, pretend or otherwise. But I understand that those secondary characters are, indeed, PRETEND. I have yet to see any gods or goddesses walk the streets of Tulsa. Queens, sure, but that’s another kind of story.
I do like it when fans write and want to know stuff about characters like they’re real and have kept on living and loving after The End. It makes me feel like I’ve done my job. Plus, books I’m writing or reading often put me in the Book Work. Know what I mean? When you feel like you’re walking around in that author’s world? I know it’s not real, and it doesn’t last, but I like it. For instance – over the holidays I painted my bedroom and master bathroom while I listened to all three of Nora’s vamp books on CD. It made the painting decidedly more enjoyable and made me feel like I was entering Geall every time I walked in my room. Seems weird now, but it was great fun then.
And I don’t think LKH is lying about the Christmas present thing. I think she’s bat shit crazy.
Well, crap. I meant Book World, not Book Work. Sorry. I even proofread.
As a writer, are your characters real? How real?
Real enough that they bitch and moan if I don’t write the story EXACTLY how they envision it.
Do they tell you what to do once you’ve created them?
More like, if I DON’T do what they want, they threaten me with writer’s block.
Is there a moment when they take control of the story and you follow them as they lead the way to the end?
Yep. That’s the cool part.
And what’s on their Amazon Wish List?
HELL’S BELLES, of course. 😉
Music is pretty huge for me too.
Oh, absolutely. Certain music sets the mood perfectly when I need to channel specific characters. The incubus Daunuan, for instance? His theme is Depeche Mode’s “Pimpf.” (And, er, all of FALLEN by Evanescence.) Music is crucial.
Visualization plays a huge role too. I sometimes “talk out” a scene before I write it. (Maybe I’m just crazy.)