characterization vs initial plot - who knew?

[Voboy]

Obvious followup: Where do your characters go when you're done with-em?

I think of my characters as kids waiting to get picked for a kickball team in third grade. And I’m both team captains. So? They just go back into the swarm while my finger hovers, deciding who it’ll land on for the next story.

 

[Javahead]

I think of my characters as kids waiting to get picked for a kickball team in third grade. And I’m both team captains. So? They just go back into the swarm while my finger hovers, deciding who it’ll land on for the next story.

If they're characters I like, they may get reused - the two main characters from several of my linked earlier stories show up as helpful minor characters in my latest.

And since I've got at least one spin-off story from "Plum Blossoms" plotted out Susan and Dave will show up as secondary characters there once I finish part 2 of "Plum Blossoms." And though I intend to wrap up the main "Plum Blossoms" story arc in part 2, I'm not ruling out a direct follow-on at some point.

But though it's fun to play games with a common setting, I really don't intend to continue this one too much beyond what I've already got plotted. If nothing else, changing your setting and characters forces you to innovate.

 

[Bramblethorn]

QUESTION:
Where do the characters go when I use the backspace key or delete on my PC?

This is going to sound silly, because it is, but: I don't like deleting characters if I'm going to retype the same characters, it feels somehow wasteful. Like, if I write "the elephant" and then decide it should be "this elephant", I will keep the "th" and just overwrite the "e", even though it might be faster to select and overwrite the whole word than to delete part of a word.

It might be a legacy of the days when I used to edit with vi, I'm not sure.

 

[ElectricBlue]

This is going to sound silly, because it is, but: I don't like deleting characters if I'm going to retype the same characters, it feels somehow wasteful. Like, if I write "the elephant" and then decide it should be "this elephant", I will keep the "th" and just overwrite the "e", even though it might be faster to select and overwrite the whole word than to delete part of a word.

It might be a legacy of the days when I used to edit with vi, I'm not sure.

That's how I've always typed. It never occurs to me to replace the whole word - I'm usually correcting the spelling, not changing the word.

 

[Hypoxia]

That's how I've always typed. It never occurs to me to replace the whole word - I'm usually correcting the spelling, not changing the word.

Ditto, at least since IBM Selectrics.