Your characters after they are done being written

[ADirtyPerv]

Along these lines, what happens to all the characters in stories that get set aside half finished? Are they getting irritable at us. "Come on. I was just about to get lucky and you decided to write another damned incest story?"

I could see an uprising out of @StillStunned's WIP folder.

OMG no, I've had one guy poised at the entry for months because I thought it was too easy. He'd be livid.

 

[UnexpectedLuggage]

My characters are fantasized versions of people I know. So on their own, they continue to exist exactly as I wrote them.

Now, if any of those people saw the stories I'd written, they'd probably shudder and be disgusted with me.

 

[MK_Whimsy]

For the most part, my characters are probably not what could be considered particularly complex or memorable, and they don't really exist outside of the story. After they have served their purpose in whatever bizarre scenario I cooked up, into the refuse heap they go.

 

[MrHereWriting]

"Do your characters behave the same after they're done being written?"

Characters aren't thoughts personified.

 

[Djmac1031]

Do you ever feel like you've taken a character for a walk outside of what they would do themselves?

Quite the opposite in fact.

While writing the second chapter in my series The Jenna Arrangement, I had Jenna suddenly falling to her knees, blowing the main male character Tom then jumping on his lap and fucking him.

It was a hot scene. But deep in the back of my head, I could almost hear Jenna protesting. "No, this is way too fast. Its only the second time I've met him and it goes against everything you've established about me in part one."

She was right, and I rewrote the scene completely. I did save elements of it for a later chapter though, when it felt more natural.

 

[Racoonteur]

Great question.

They do, in the sense that we all act "out of character" from time to time, but as a rule tend to stay consistent in how we relate to the world around us.

That's what makes all our stories interesting after all, isn't it? Those oddball moments where we do the unexpected and life suddenly gets a bit more frantic.

If we're lucky, we can capture it on the page and share it with others who see the beauty, joy, challenge, drama, of it all.

 

[AchtungNight]

I should also mention there are some things in my characters’ lives that I don’t have time or interest enough to document. Maybe they won’t interest the readers, maybe my interactions with the characters do not support documenting certain aspects of their daily lives, or maybe the scenes end up cut during editing. Whatever. Doesn’t mean they don’t still exist in the space between pages. They might be revealed dramatically or otherwise at some point, or maybe not. Depends on how the inspiration flows and what the stories need.

 

[ChuckWolf]

Having thought about it more:

Coach Laurie in the first of her stories, is shown to have a self-destructive streak and always looking for an opportunity to take sexual advantage of the students of the college where she works, so that kind of stuff is happening off-page.

Sharon (from Nudist Retreat Humiliation and Halloween Humiliation) is a cougar that loves her shy and younger unnamed significant other (the protagonist of the stories), but gets very turned on by putting him into sexually-charged situations, where he winds up naked in public, but other than that, they probably have a sweet and normal relationship.

I;m sure other examples will come to mind over time.

 

[TheExperimentalist]

New poster here. Hello. Hi. How are you?

My wife made this comment... "Do your characters behave the same after they're done being written?"

I was quiet for like three minutes after that, thinking about it. And I don't know. Do your characters behave the same once you've stopped puppet-mastering them? Or do they look back at what you've written, what you've made them do, and shudder?

Of course, what your character would do is defined in your own writing, but there's a point at which they feel like they are defined. Solid. Almost real. They would fight a turn of events if you gave them a voice to do so.

I write T/I exclusively so far, and IMO I really take pains to make the content fit the character, but sometimes the horny mind takes over to the detriment of the characters.

Do you ever feel like you've taken a character for a walk outside of what they would do themselves?

I've come across this post a few times since it went up and it's always resonated with me. I wanted to comment, but wasn't sure what.


It was definitely an eye-opening way to think about character development, one that I THINK I try to do. To me, the approach says, essentially, that the characters' actions in a story should flow naturally from their experiences and motivations, with only slight nudges from the author to keep the story on track, rather than forcefully turning the wheel in a direction the characters would never go on their own.

To that end, I think I'm pretty decent at it. A character MAY look back at their actions and shudder, but I like to hope it's still their OWN actions they're re-evaluating, for entirely human reasons. For example, they may have grown as a person to a place where they think differently about those actions, or they may have had an unresolved internal conflict at the time they took those actions that has only grown since then, leading to complex feelings looking back, but it won't be because they became someone other than themselves for the brief window into their lives framed by the story. At least, I hope it won't. I wouldn't want to do that to someone, even someone fictional.

 

[ADirtyPerv]

I've come across this post a few times since it went up and it's always resonated with me. I wanted to comment, but wasn't sure what.


It was definitely an eye-opening way to think about character development, one that I THINK I try to do. To me, the approach says, essentially, that the characters' actions in a story should flow naturally from their experiences and motivations, with only slight nudges from the author to keep the story on track, rather than forcefully turning the wheel in a direction the characters would never go on their own.

To that end, I think I'm pretty decent at it. A character MAY look back at their actions and shudder, but I like to hope it's still their OWN actions they're re-evaluating, for entirely human reasons. For example, they may have grown as a person to a place where they think differently about those actions, or they may have had an unresolved internal conflict at the time they took those actions that has only grown since then, leading to complex feelings looking back, but it won't be because they became someone other than themselves for the brief window into their lives framed by the story. At least, I hope it won't. I wouldn't want to do that to someone, even someone fictional.

Right. Exactly. Like, all of that.

In the example I gave, I brought the mom into the mix with the siblings, not because it flowed from her character (she wasn't much of a character) or because the siblings wanted her (they have no hint of it ahead of time). It was because they were in a tense situation with her, and I had the urging from commenters in the back of my mind, suggesting that it made sense somehow. It didn't. I could've definitely gotten there, but that's not the story I was telling.

I think they would look back at their relationship with each other and grin; they would look back at the relationship with their mom and shudder.

Lessons learned. Commenters are dumb and I should pretend they don't exist.