Did you create your characters or did your characters create you?

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Kind of a thought exercise based on something I saw on another site.

Sort of goes along with other threads about how you came up with your characters and the situations they find themselves in. Are they straight from your imagination, or did past experiences form the basis of what you write?

Even the fantasy and scifi writers can chime in since only the setting really changes from stories on Earth with humans.

So, who came first, you or your characters?

Or do you come together?

Right now.

 

[AG31]

My simple erotica stories don't contain much character. So neither.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

Both probably. Me and my characters feed off each other's neuroses like any good toxic relationship.

 

[SimonDoom]

IMO, I come before my characters, because I existed before I wrote anything, and my characters are based in part on things I've experienced, felt, and thought.

My stories are not autobiographical. They are based on me in the very broad sense that they are a fulfillment of creative and erotic fantasies that have built up over a long time.

I'm over 60 and I've only been writing Lit stories for a bit over 9 years, so it makes no sense to say that I am derived from my characters. I'm the same person I was before I ever wrote a character.

 

[NuclearFairy]

Like with most things, it's probably a little of both. Some are more of one than the other.

Like for instance, I've never been in a horrifically abusive situation. However, I've heard lots of first hand accounts of abuse. Most of which were from a bunch of immigrants who fled their original home country and got into the us on asylum visas. We were taking remedial classes together to get our ged's, and they recognized their pre-abuse selves in me.

However, for another story, I've never had anyone try to deny my existence, I've never heard any detailed stories from those that have. Likewise with taking over a place to make it better, or living in a big polycule. I don't have intimate knowledge of any of that. Neither first hand nor second hand, that comes almost entirely from my imagination and from what I could find when trying to research it. Some of which was surprisingly difficult to research.

And as for my sex scenes, yeah varying amounts of pure imagination, and I've experience that.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

Life creates my characters. Even those that are born from other people's likeness, it's my life that ends up making them. The more I detach myself from them, the closer they are of me. All writing is autobiographical.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

100% me creating the characters.

Even before my latest novel and all the characters in it, I have easily created over 500 individual characters since I began writing. Some major characters and some extremely minor, but all with names and developed traits that make them unique.

I have only written one character that could be considered somewhat autobiographical. If you read my stories, he'll be the one character that you love the most. I guarantee it.

 

[Djmac1031]

Are they straight from your imagination, or did past experiences form the basis of what you write?

A little of both I suppose. Ill cite what I believe is one of my best characters, Cozbi the She-Demon, as an example.

Cozbi was first featured in a story called The Devil And Angel Em, a story inspired by a humorous conversation with my friend @EmilyMiller in which we discussed increasingly outlandish ideas about making her a nun character in a story.

The idea eventually evolved into a story about a guy who sells his soul to the Devil then needs to seduce a nun to win it back.

So I started writing and I needed a Devil / Demon character and decided it should be female, all the better to lure my simple, not too bright male character into the bargain.

Next i needed a name, and a Google search on female demon names produced Cozbi. A character featured in a Biblical story. My past history growing up in a religious household that read the Bible.... well, religiously... helped me recall the story of Cozbi, a woman murdered along with her husband for the "crime" of coming from a "heathen" nation.

Her story made her the perfect candidate for MY story, although I didn't manage to work her history i to an actual story until the prequel, The Seduction Of Darkness.

Then there's Cozbi's penchant for quoting pop culture references. That of course comes from me, because I do it all the time.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Then there's Cozbi's penchant for quoting pop culture references. That of course comes from me, because I do it all the time.

I’d never noticed

 

[crookedletter]

Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

 

[Andreas_Kreuz]

In my case the characters created me. I met one woman who told me about a fantasy of hers. (Whore for one day) Tried to invent a scenario for her, which became my first story here. Another story is inspired by another woman. First chapter is autobiographical, from then on it is projection. The men (the nice ones) often have traits in common with me. They are often INTP/ENTP personalities.

 

[anthrodisiac]

Even the fantasy and scifi writers can chime in

Gee, thanks

I know a lot of authors write for catharsis, and so the characters shape them in turn. I don't. So I guess you can say I came first. Which tracks. I usually cum before my characters because it takes so damn long to get to the sex scenes.

Like any interaction, it's hard to come away from writing a story not changed in some small way, especially if you're writing more socially aware pieces or deeper characters and you have to dig into the messiness of human experience and societal pressures, philosophies, etc. Which is where I live, as a satire author.

I've definitely had pespective shifts as the result of my writing. And since I only exist at this exact moment, I suppose all my characters come before me, because they live and are fixed in the past, unchanging, while I continue to evolve and grow, a cycle of ego destruction and rebirth, unending 'til death.



Don't get me started on stuff like this, man. I went off the deep end about the nature of consciousness a long-ass time ago.

 

[SkyBubble]

I've had characters spring up pretty much full-blown. Others I've definitely created.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Characters are like children. You give birth to them, you nurture them, and past a certain point they go off to have their own life with its own cycle. You reflect on them, and they reflect on you, but your control over them wanes the longer they're out on their own.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Excellent question - they created me.
My Beautiful Debbie is a true or at least true-ish story. It's the story I came to Lit to write. But I couldn't pull it off at the time and I was complaining about it to an old friend whom I'd told I once had a crush on her. She encouraged me to try another, based on a fictional affair between she and I. It ended up being my first story, Mama's Beach House.
My early sexual experiences fueled this need to write and it's been intensely gratifying.

 

[THBGato]

I created my characters with a blend of real life inspirations and idealisation.

However, they then needed a public facing persona to act as their author.

So my characters then invented THBGato.

I've never lied on this forum or in DMs,* but THBGato and the actual author are quite different.

*One major way they are different is that, in RL, I am an extremely talented liar. I always win that ice-breaker game. You know the one.

 

[LegendInMyOwnMind]

Both, of course. Almost always, when we ask either/or, the true answer is both/and. Do we want love or sex?