Characters

[champagne1982]

Pixels I know and admire...

The characters I find for my stories bloom from seeds I plant each time I have an experience. They are fully formed and have a life outside of the sex I place them in.

Many likely have the same character flaws as I do since almost all of the young women in my stories are living something that's really happened; something I wish would happen or something that would never happen but in a fantasy or a story.

Other than my slightly more developed story, Meeting Jimmy, I have only written vignettes, brief sketches of a singular incident. My character development needs to take place in the mind of the reader so that the players seem whole and plausible. I think that is harder than being able to create ways for them to be assholes or angels in my text. I need to get people to feel them.

I hope you know what I mean.. I'd hate to be thought of as babbling.

Carrie

 

[jfinn]

My characters aren't based on anyone I know in particular though I will give them an occasional characteristic of someone I know (in Amy's Smile, Miriam's voice is really my cousin's, a truly frightening sound).

I do however have one quirk that I include in almost every chapter and/or short story I write. I do a little homage to another writer who's a friend. Sometimes its a name or a quirk of a character, once it was his cat, but it's always there and he has to look for it since I won't tell him what it is before hand.

Jayne

 

[Croctden]

Maybe

. My character development needs to take place in the mind of the reader so that the players seem whole and plausible. I think that is harder than being able to create ways for them to be assholes or angels in my text. I need to get people to feel them.

I hope you know what I mean.. I'd hate to be thought of as babbling.

Carrie

Do you mean you intentionally keep the stories short to preserve your characters? Do some of them show up repeatedly in your vignettes?

 

[champagne1982]

Re: Maybe

Do you mean you intentionally keep the stories short to preserve your characters? Do some of them show up repeatedly in your vignettes?

Well, I find it difficult to sustain intense sexuality for long. When I write I try to place myself as one of the characters. Some day, I'd like to be skilled enough to find myself as the man.....
So I guess, yes I do keep them intentionally short but not solely because of character preservation but for the sake of my sanity as well.

Recently, I had a friend tell me to lose the autobiographical stuff so maybe I'll take his advice and stop having a certain feminine character show up. He tells me I'm much better detached...

 

[Rainbow Skin]

One of mine (mustn't say which) is explicitly about a friend of mine whom I fantasize LOTS about, but the name has been changed in the very unlikely event of this friend stumbling across naughty story sites and happening to see that one.

Other than that my characters are pretty much inventions from nothing, or out of a few ideas that swirl together: things I see in passing, a foxglove, cars in a rat-run, freckles on a shoulder, a husky laugh. As these accrete, I may feel I've got enough background detail to be convincing. The person is made up on the fly as I write, though their shoulders or thighs might have existed beforehand, like an erotic Cheshire cat.

It seems a slightly less writerly thing to use existing material. We should be making it up. Better exercise.

 

[Guest]

Nearly missed this thread; very interesting comments and ideas.

My posted fiction is utterly that. As I think afterwards about what my characters do I cannot even think of anything factual about them in my RL. But I do have affection for them, the nice ones, and they become real for me. I think about them later as if they were real and the events really happened.

I tried doing a character based on a good friend, yet even with the fictionalization to keep her anonymous I did not like 'exposing' her 'publicly' so I deleted her.

My poems though are not fiction. Yes, poems may include what in other genres one calls characters.

Perdita

Earl: I reread that story, you boobie; you got my eye color wrong, again! - Pear