Authors and their characters

It’s sort of weird how characters and authors interact. For some people its like their characters are this other voice in their head, while for others they are only displayed through paper. But when it gets to the point where the characters write the story, the author is no longer making the characters, they are discovering who they are.

In the novel I’m writing I basically took my personality traits and said ‘This character will have this one. And this character will have this trait’ and let them make decisions based off that being their main personality trait. But even when I did that, I found that I knew what characters would do in a situation, but I never knew why they did it. Then as I added more characters, more plot changes, more setting changes, everything sort of fell into place. I started to realize ‘OH, this character does this because ______, _______, and ______’.

I’m only writing about this today because I’ve been feeling nervous a lot lately, and I just keep thinking ‘I have NO clue how Yuri can put up with this ALL THE TIME’. (Yuri being the main character in Sky’s Content.) Because she likes/loves Shikamaru she always gets those butterflies, she always get flushed and she ALWAYS overreacts. Like I know I take Yuri to the extreme on the nervousness, but still.

The only real positive thing I can think of that can come from this nervousness (aside from what’s actually causing the nervousness, the reason is a good one) is that I now have so many more ways to describe Yuri’s nervousness it’s fantastic!

But then you get those characters that are just not like you at all and you wonder how they even came into existence. Like one of the main females in my novel is very family oriented; her entire character is based off the loyalty she feels for her family. Like don’t get me wrong, I am close to my family, but she takes it to the extreme. It’s the ONLY way I can describe her because it influences everything she does.

And then there are the characters you just love to hate and hate to love. There is one male character in my novel that is so warped and twisted, but he is absolutely my favourite character without a doubt. I just felt an instant connection with him when I made him. We probably wouldn’t be friends or anything, in fact I’m pretty sure he would hate me if he knew me. But he just pulls me into him, and that’s why I hate to love him -_-

In the end though, characters are not just characters. They’re not just people you write about in pages, and that’s it. They influence not only the authors, but the people who read the book. Whether its a good influence or a bad one, they make a difference.

Question for the Comments: What is your favourite character from something that you’ve read/written?

Writing

I have been writing stories since around 2004, so about five years now. It’s one of my biggest passions even though it didn’t start out that way. In elementary school I was LUCKY to get a 70% or a B- in English. In fact I always did better in French than I did in English! I really hated how wordy it had to be; it felt like no matter what I wrote it was never right. Which really sucked for me because I was your typical nerd who was outcasted by the other kids, so grades was all I really had…

ANYWAYS, so I get to grade 8-9 and I start reading fan fiction. That’s when I realize that writing could be interesting! That it wasn’t all boring readings that teachers gave you where you had to analyze and answer questions. Granted the first couple of fan fictions I read were horribly written and horribly thought up. But hey, it was the first thing that actually spiked my writing interest.

Then around the end of 2004 I started to write my own fan fictions. I always had ideas on how to change anime to my liking, and admittedly I had usually put myself as the main character. But then again I still do that in my current stories; it helps me to understand how the character is supposed to be feeling. (For instance, Yuri appeals to my more shy and emotional side).

That’s around the time I started to pay attention in English class! I wanted to get better in English because I started to realize the suck that was my writing skills. And because of that my English marks rose up into the low 90’s or an A.

So now it’s about five years after I started and I’m still writing fan fiction. Well only my Shikamaru story and that’s because I want to finish it. It was always a series that I loved to think of ideas for. And in the past two months I’ve written about 60 pages worth for it. I was a little worried with the dry spell I had in 2008 that I was losing my passion for writing. As in 2008 I wrote a whopping 4 chapters, but when I wrote 5 chapters in a month for Sky’s Content I realized it was just the situation I was in at the time.

But now it’s about time for me to branch out of fan fiction and to write my own original stories. Which, will hopefully one day become my own novels.

I’ve been working on this idea for a story for about a year and two months. It originated from a role play a friend and I started back in 2006 I think. I just loved the concept and we never finished roleplaying what I had planned out for the story. So now about a million setting changes, and about 10 main/secondary characters later, I’m pretty sure I’m ready to start writing.

Although, I have to admit at this point I have NO clue if the story is any good. But if it’s managed to keep my interest for more than a year, that has to say something right? I think I have only told about 3 people little snippets of plot details here and there (In a year!). Even then, some of those plot things has changed since I told them. But they seemed to like the concept so hopefully it’s not that bad! Haha.

But before I want to write the story I want to do a TON of reading. Reading is a major step in improving your writing. You get introduced to not only different writing styles, but different types of voices, and not to mention you generally widen your vocabulary. I know my voice, I just gotta concentrate on the style now

But yeah, that’s basically writing and how it relates to me!

Question for the comments: If you write, how did you get started?