Authors and your Characters

Reading a few of the serialized stories on here and from reading other fiction that spans two to three books got me thinking about authors attachment to characters.

I know I favor some of my characters in my stories but once the story is complete I can move on.

So, do any of you get emotionally attached to your creations in any sort of way?

Yes. Mark/Megan from my SWB series which took a year and a half to write became my children and when I had to get to some rough scenes with them near the end it really affected me, as if they were real friends.

Not emotionally attached. But some that I want to use again.

Emotional attachment? I'm not sure. I re-use and re-cycle and re-imagine many players -- sometimes the same player with various names, sometimes the same names for very different people. Most of my Randy Ronks are different people, unrelated to their namesake. One real person manifests as MariLyn or Mary Sue or Mary Jane -- all the same short Saxon blonde with the accomplished younger sister (who may be Beth or Bev or whatever).

Some characters persist in my JOURNAL stories (RON, RUTH, etc) because they're actual people in actual timelines. AM *I* emotionally attached to them? No, but the narrator is.

I enjoy my characters while I write them, but when a story comes to an end, I'm usually glad and ready to move on. I rarely feel compelled to continue with the same characters. Even in the nonhuman trilogy I did (which isn't up here), the second and third books focused on different characters, and the main characters from the first book were now minor characters.

I want to be emotionally attached to my characters. I figure that if I can get attached to them, maybe my readers can too.

But when it's time to say bye-bye to them, I don't lose any sleep over it.

I guess in a way I get attached to them, I created them after all and gave them a written life. I find some I grow an attachment to, maybe because I see a bit of myself in them, or something I would like in myself. I found writing characters has changed who I am in ways, how I think and such. In that regard, I find an attachment to my character for helping me.
Regardless of how a character makes me feel, if that character has to suffer or die, they do without question. So I do get attached, but not to the point it will change how I write them in the story.

I wrote a six book series about the exact same characters in each. There were other characters in each of the books that were different, but the core character group was the same.

I do have on-going characters and I have had since my first postings on Literotica of my Silverbridge series. That started with The Bridesmaids' Revenge and the last story involving those characters appeared this year as Harold Saves Her Husband Pt. 03. Harold and Lisa were in the first story as major players and they were two of the major characters in the Pt. 03.

They have developed and changed. Why not? It is fifteen years since I first wrote about them.

More recently, Caroline and Nick are the main characters in my four part series starting with Birth and Death. I really need to change the titles so that they appear as a four-part series.

Jeanne D'Artois has two characters framing each Laundry story - Martha the ghost who tells ghost stories, and the unnamed middle-aged potter lady who ends up living them.

PennLady said:

I enjoy my characters while I write them, but when a story comes to an end, I'm usually glad and ready to move on.

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I'll be glad to send my BLACK & WHITE and LEFT BEHIND characters to HEA (or even HFN) endings. They're inventions, easily dismissed. I'll admit a liking for a number of THE BOOK OF RUTH characters, but I know I'll have to kill-off a few more of them before the series ends (with a prequel). I'm stuck with the players in my RON and DEXTER series because their histories have yet to unfold fully.

I wrote some characters as disposable items, to be used in one-shots -- but readers want sequels, so they live on! That's how BLACK & WHITE became two rump mini-series, and A TASTE OF INCEST: LEMONADE will be at least a 3-parter (as might A TASTE OF HONEY). That's probably why I wrote my RANDY stories as separate universes where players share names but nothing else. That way, I can recycle a character rather than shitcan them and start with someone new. I just need to specify that RANDY RANDY ain't the same as THAT'S MY GIRL's Randy.

Am I attached to Randy? No; he's just a convenient puppet.

I get attached to some of my characters, yeah. One of the reasons I haven't written any follow-up to my most popular story here is feeling like the poor lasses have been through enough drama and deserve some time to be happy without the hand of Author coming in to fuck things up for them again