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 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 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, , 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.
Well, so long as they don't start telling you to burn things, everything is fine heather 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 ) 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 ). 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 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" 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.
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.
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.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!
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
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.
