I've been curious for a while about how people approach writing their characters. Some people have just a few characters they write about, other have dozens. I figured I would ask the questions I'm curious about in a little survey, and people could have fun answering it. Especially on a site like this one, I'm interested to see what people's responses are.
So, without further ado, the questions. Note that these all concern original characters.
1. Are any of your characters based off of you? I notice this a lot with the so called "Keep Stories" where people call their character "my magi."
2. Do you prefer writing male or female characters? Why?
3. How attached do you get to your own characters? Do you think getting too attached is a problem?
4. How attached do you get to other people's characters?
5. Do you formulate a story to fit your characters, or do you write characters to fit a story?
6. How do you go about making a character? Do you think it's an effective method?
As for my answers...
1. I never base my characters off of myself. I'm just not that interesting.
2. I find it much easier to write male characters. Writing females is harder for me, plus I always feel like people judge female characters more harshly.
3. This is a hard one...I do get attached to my characters, but only on a very shallow level. I obviously care if I decide to kill them off or otherwise make them suffer, but it doesn't crush me, and most of the time I see it as potential for growth. (Although there is one character that I'm dreading killing off in one of my other works because I do like him a lot, but it must be done.) My characters are objects, to do with what I will, not people. Their purpose is to entertain me and my readers.
Naturally, though, I do my best to flesh them out as people-but I don't perceive them as such. I don't have character "muses" or anything. I think getting too attached to your own characters can be a writing weakness, as it can increase the chances of creating a Mary Sue, or of adding in some stupid Deus Ex Machina to save them. It also lures people into the trap of perceiving their character a certain way without actually showing it to the audience.
4. I have a really hard time getting attached to other people's characters. It's kind of annoying, too, because enjoyment of a book is affected by my enjoyment of the characters. I can't get attached if the writing is poor or the characters are shallow archetypes. Some people can, and they can salvage a poor story because of it, but I simply can't. I have read books where the character gets raped and tortured at the end and just been like "And I care why?" because the character is a flat archetype throughout the story. Archetypes should be used to help begin the set up of a character, not be the character itself. It's the skeleton that must be fleshed out.
When a character is fully developed, I do get attached, but not to an extreme level. My rule of thumb is that if I care if the character died (either sad or happy about it, in the case of a villain) then I cared enough.
5. I typically come up with the setting first, and the plot and characters grow out of that. Even then, I typically have a plot planned out, and the characters add in the branches of the tree, so to speak-but they don't have any bearing on the ultimate outcome of the story.
6. Most of my characters pop into my head. I don't do much character outlining or anything before a story begins-I write and the characters react to their surroundings with the personality constraints that I set on them, with background put in when it fits. I'm not sure this is the best way to write characters, though-I've been dinged on characterization before by readers of certain works, especially older works. Characterization is not easy for me, especially in first person.
So what about you guys? What thought processes go into making your characters, and how attached do you get?
)
