I started writing when i was 9 years old, i promise my characters were like my best friends. Does anyone feel their characters are real? or am i muy loco?

What may be real to you, may be filmsy and cardboard to others.

It's not how emotional you feel during your work, but, rather, if your work illicits emotion in others.

Eyez is true. My sister complains my characters are imbalanced. Nevertheless, my characters are not my friends, but a part of me. Everyone is in someplace, somehow and at sometime something different. I can be egoistic and humble, both in different situations. My characters sprout from within me, as a part of me. The villian is a part of the darkness I live in and the hero is my aspiration. So, they're more than friends.

I agree also no matter how many diffrent characters I create, these two characters mean everything to mean and i feel like they are real. Sometimes I ask myself what they would do in a situation. I guess I'm just strange

That's exactly what I do too. For example, I often take advice from my characters as to what they would do in a situation. It's pretty natural, not weird or strange.

Yep. My characters are generally their own people and they are pretty real to me. I think mostly because you have to put yourself in the character's eyes in order to understand how they will react to the situation or conflict you place them in.

I think it depends what you mean by real. You need to have a clear enough perception of who they are to know whether a particular action or comment is in character for them or not, keeping in mind that real people are never 100% consistent. But that doesn't mean they have to be real, as in an imaginary friend. If you lose that line between imagination and reality, that road is the highway to madness.

I agree with that. I tend to associate with my characters as though they are real. I don't talk to them or anything but I try to put myself in their shoes. It makes it easier to write if they are not so "arms length"

I think it's easier to breathe life into a character that you are comfortable with on a human level and have some sort of connection to them.

It's kind of the same process that a reader goes through when they connect with the characters of a story they are reading.

By the way, Cog, will you take a look at my story in the General Fiction section. It's a long one, but I'd be curious to know what you thought.

I have a couple of characters from my roleplays that I think of as real people. I imagine having conversations with them and stuff... I don't really get that with my fiction writing... I guess I experience it with my roleplay characters because I am living (writing) in their shoes on a daily basis.

Thanks i really appreciate all the responses. i dont have actual conversations with my charaters but i often think of them when going through something in my life. and i'll be like, hmm he would do this or she would say that. with me i was very shy, so often times i lived out my desires thru my charaters, and i could deal with things without actually having experienced them. if that makes sense. i suppose if you're going to portray them as real people than you have to view them that way...

I started writing when i was 9 years old, i promise my characters were like my best friends. Does anyone feel their characters are real? or am i muy loco? i am going to let you into a little secret, which yea, might make me sound completely crazy byt what the heck. i talk to my charectors. when i get stuck with what i am writing about, i lie in my bed on a night and pretend that i am having a conversation with a few of my charectors. like roleplay almost. i know it sounds silly, but by trying to get into the charector of your main, or anyother one, or by having conversations with some of your charectors, it really helps me to feel attatched to them and i develop them so much more. it is really wierd, but it works. i do feel like my charectors are real sometimes, but i think it helps me to write better.

i might just be crazy aswell though, lol. good luck with your writing and stuff. :)
Heather

I don't talk to my characters as such, but they often complain about my treatment of them :redface: Although they learn fairly quickly not to, because I just treat them more harshly if they do :p My characters, I suppose, are like seperate personalities within my own mind. Which is quite worrying really...

My characters, I suppose, are like seperate personalities within my own mind. Which is quite worrying really... yeah, that is exactly what i mean, only i actually talk to them and stuff, like outloud when no-one is around. i have been known, by myself, :p, to attempt to play out scenes that i am not too sure ow i want them to turn out like. but like i said, i am a nut job. :D

Well, so long as they don't start telling you to burn things, everything is fine heather :D

Do you tend to play out scenes in your head as you write them, or before you start?

ermm, i do both. sometimes i will be lying awake at night as i cannot sleep again, and i will start talking to myself really. but i will talking in the charector of someone in my story. then i will find myself having a proper conversarion with someone else that is in my novel, then i find myself springing from my bed and grabbing the chopstick i keep by the side of my bed (don't ask) and aiming it as a wand.

i tend to do things like that, or i will walk round and tound my room with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders pretending it is a cape and i am going somewhere and so on and so forth (yes, i used your saying :p) i know, i probably sound like a right crack head here, but it is no different from acting i suppose, just in private and i find it really helps with things.

the other day we went for a walk around Hardwick Hall and i was walking behind my parents (i wasn't talking to them again) and i was (in my mind this time as in public people think i am a nutter if i talk to no-one) having a conversation with a charector and we were walking arm in arm down the same path and discussing what was happening in my story world.

i hope i am making sense here, and i hope you don't end up thinking i am a nut. i have never told anyone my secret before. :(

Heather

Lol. You aren't a nut (well, you are, but not because of that :p). You just have a very vibrant imagination. Which is a good thing :) I, on the other hand, am crazy.

haha, well i know you are craxy, and i am a nut, i just don't want my funny writing habbits to add to the list. thats kinda why no-one, well apart form the site, knows how i write :p and yea, people keep telling me i have a vidid imagination, which i think is starting to become a friendly way of saying "sit down you crazy lady" :p

you should try it anyways, when you have the house to yourself sit and talk to your charector, ot get really vivid and act out scenes that you want to happen in your novel. it helps a lot with conversations.

for example, in something i am writing i need the parents to explain to their daughter that she is adopted, and wasn't sure how to go about it. so i sat down and had a conversation, making both the voices, of the parents and the child and tried several different senarios of how the conversation should go. eventually i think i got there.

i get really attatched though. i mean, one time i needed to kill a charector, and so i could get the emotion into my work, i decided to act out the scene. and i ended up crying over this imaginary dead person. it worked though, my writing sounded so much more emotive because of me doing it, i just felt very say with puffy eyes. :p

Heather, I do exactly the same thing. The acting and everything. I personally don't ahve conversations with my characters, but my characters talk to each other all the time in my head, and I find that I spend so much time acting out scenes and going over the emotions, etc, that my characters are feeling, that it affects my actual mood. I had to write a death scene the other day (from the PoV of the killer), and I was angry and vindictive for hours afterward.

In answer to the original question; my characters are completely real to me, perhaps because I spend so much time pretending I'm them. I'm hardly ever friends with them, but I know them inside out and backwards.

Ladies, you're scaring me...

Ladies, you're scaring me... run boy, run!! :p

There is no escaping the lunatic asylum....
Join us...
Join us!

Drifting off topic, folks...

Quite literally, my characters are my best friends. I take qualities of people I know around me and make a character out of them --to make it fictional, however, I will mix and match characteristics or take a certain trait to an extreme or something. In essence, I like to think that my characters are actually real. :p

P.S. --Heather, about talking to your characters. You are sooo not crazy --as long as you keep it in your head. If you go around talking out loud in broad daylight...alright, youre crazy. But I'm actually going to try that! :)

Well, so long as they don't start telling you to burn things, everything is fine heather :D

Do you tend to play out scenes in your head as you write them, or before you start?

My characters are quite real to me, and I tend to play out a scene in vivid detail in my head before I start writing and then let it develop as I write. My visualization skills mean that I can see in my head exactly what I writing.

I don't talk to my characters though :D

lol, thanks mypenmysoul, and yea you should try it, i think it helps. and i do a similar things, were you base certain charectors around people you know. i always take their names aswell, lol.

My characters aren't particularly real until about the third draft of any given story. (It's usually around the third run-through that I start to give them distinctive voices in dialogue, habits, etc.) Before that, they're just sort of cardboard cutouts.

Even with finished stories, they're not as real to me as real people. I call them finished when a beta reader tells me I've brought the characters to life in their minds.

My characters certainly aren't friends, lol. There's always something I seriously dislike about every character I write; it's a personal rule.

What seems to work best for me is if I start with my characters. To me, a story has to be about people. I create the universe in which my characters live and then I create the characters. I write pages about where they grew up and what they were like when they were kids, etc. (none of this appears in the stories, it's just prep work, trying to make the characters real in my own head). There's times when it seems like needless work but I'll promise you, I never reach a point in a story where I find myself asking "What would she do in THIS situation?" I already know.

Sometimes my characters become incredibly real to me. There was one little story I started, about a guy who lived in his fantasies, and neglected reality. I couldn't finish it because it was too sad, and it reminded me of myself.

Or sometimes I'll have a character do something that is important to the plot, but still very stupid and I'll think 'Aah, you idiot! why'd you do that!'

I talk out loud with them too, deliberately. Hearing the actual words is heaps better than just thinking or reading them, it makes it more realistic.

I might be crazy, but it's okay, I'm getting help. One of the voices in my head is a psychiatrist!

I talk out loud with them too, deliberately. Hearing the actual words is heaps better than just thinking or reading them, it makes it more realistic.


Hi Montag - I don't thnk that's crazy. Lot's of people don't pay enough attention to how they write dialog. I can't count the number of times I've read something and said to myself, "Real people don't talk like that." But I think that the secret is having your characters talk differently. They've all got different lives, maybe they were born and raised in different places, different economic classes, etc. But it's got to be real. Some actors are quite good at this (I like the old British actors) and you can learn a lot about writing dialog by watching old movies. Thanks

some really good thoughts on characters in this thread.

heather - i wouldn't advise using the names of real people for your characters. that can lead to all kinds of nastiness.

my characters never seem too real to me because they're just characters. they exist only in my head. i think you can get bogged down in writing reams of exposition about the characters you're trying to create - childhood experiences, relationships, traumas and so on. i think this kind of approach to character creation sometimes limits you because you feel the urge to adhere to the profile you've written.

the best advice i was given about character development was to let that person's actions speak for them. for example, if you want your readers to know that your character is untrustworthy create a scene where they do something immoral. actions do speak louder than words and that will always shine through more successfully than simply stating, 'Geoff So-And-So was a real sneaky bugger'

i agree if you use names of people you really know then you might see them differently in real life as their character develops in the story.

if you've heard of lucid dreaming, its where your dreaming but you realize you are and you control it. i might be crazy, but if i realize im in a dream, then sometimes i bring these characters into it and it really helps me get their personality down.

as an example if im in a dream of being chased, i think, what if she (the antagonist of my stories) was the one chasing me.

if your specific about the direction you want the book to go, though, dont try it. Because of doing this, the main character essentially is me in every way now, and he is no longer deathly afraid of the main antagonist (who tried to murder him as a child)

I must not like my characters. I keep putting them in risky situations I would not wish upon anyone I really knew. I think a character is a stand in for some "place" in the universe. Some emotional state, some set of experiences. In a lot of cases, i would not like to be my characters. I find something worth being in them (most) and valuable to learn from them, perhaps, but I really would rather be the writer. I think if I liked my characters, and they were my friends, I wouldn't abuse them like I do.

My characters are completely and utterly real...to me. I talk about them as if they are standing right next to me and if that makes me insane, so be it. I know the difference between my imagination and reality, I just choose to blur the lines. My characters get what I always wanted, what I never had, and the blunt end of the emotion that I always bottle up. My characters are my friends, my enemies, and those that I would probably pass on the street without a second glance. I can't see myself writing anything if my characters didn't breathe some sort of life.

in my vast horde of usable characters ive created over my writing 'career', there's a few that are VERY VERY real to me. One time i almost called my friend by one of their names!!
My main 'cast' sitting at around five, they all come from different stories. My newest story has them all together and they develop more personality as a result. One, i realize, i was using to portray the person who i wanted to be. Of course i didnt see that then, but now hes very easy to write about, because in a sense, my characters ARE me.

Yes i admit it, originally i just take a single trait/fact about that person and extremify it. It makes me feel naive

At least for me, it helped a LOT to develop full character personality - and then ask myself, "Okay, how the heck did Os get that way?" Or Berendon, or the other characters - you don't need to do it for everyone, but it really helps for your main characters. It also helps with portraying legitimate conflicts - think Ron in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. By the seventh book, J.K. Rowling had already demonstrated that Ron was the most likely of the trio to "flake out" or get discouraged or envious.

I don't remember who said it first (not me), but there is a famous quote that goes something like this: "An author should know everything about his world. He doesn't have to know every tiny detail, and every detail does not have to be included in the story, but an author should know about the "rest of the world" that isn't included in the story."

It also helps, incidentally, if a plot thread takes an unexpected turn and your character is faced with something odd that he his unprepared for. How would your character react if you, the author, knocked on his front door and asked for an interview? How would your character react if you told him that you were from another world?

What if your character was walking along on the Great Quest to Save the World, slipped, and broke an ankle - would he curse? Cry? Yell? Stare for five minutes at the swelling area, then pull out a wad of poppy sap and start smoking it? (That's opium, incidentally.) Would he be alone, or would he have an ally nearby - and would his allies be severely annoyed, worried, angry, defeatist, or ....

Well, you see my point. Acting out scenes, either verbally or mentally, can really help, too.

*Sigh* I remember really wanting to enter the Short Story Contest, except that if I did, it would put my magic system and chars into the public domain - and I'm pretty possessive about the magic system.

heather - i wouldn't advise using the names of real people for your characters. that can lead to all kinds of nastiness. why like??

ill answer it
-you dont see the person the same anymore
-if they find your story they WILL be offended by SOMETHING

oow yea,, i guess so. but then again, if it is only first names then i am sure they have seen a film with someone using their name before. it happens. i try not to so much now like.

I rarely base my characters on anyone but mysef, for the fact that they would only ever be bad characters. The people I know close to me have too many bad characteristics.

Sometimes I'll use a minor person in my life as a base but not their personality. All my characters are either distlled parts on me or completely fictional. I spend more time thinking up characters than I spend thinking up stories. I have whole life stories put away in my head.

I started writing when i was 9 years old, i promise my characters were like my best friends. Does anyone feel their characters are real? or am i muy loco?

In certain cases - mostly when the specific character (and usually accompanied by a basic story idea.. a conflict or something) just pops into my head - it is SO alive that I find myself being surprised by its reactions. Sometimes, I plan the storyline more or less, but find myself having to adjust it here and there according to what my character just decides to act like.


Those are the best times.. but they can be scary, too. :P

~moo

I dont think you can write a good book if you dont see your characters as real. if you think of one of them as a character in a story then they ARE a character in a story. the whole point of making realistic dialogue and descriptions etc is so that it looks REAL
it can't look real if you dont see it that way.
On the subject of naming certain characters after real ppl you know, i do it sometimes. just so my m8s can get a kick out of being in the story. i dont presume to know what they think when they read, but i suspect seeing themselves in the story makes the character a litle more real to them. and that is wat we want isnt it? a REAListic story??