When incidental characters hijack your muse...

[PennyThompson]

I named a pair of background characters, Britneigh and Eighmy, solely as a joke about silly suburban white girl names. They barely had a description, they didn't do anything other than say hi to a main character.

Several commenters thought they were funny that I brought them back for another scene a couple of chapters later.

Now I'm strongly considering writing a side story for them, just because they're so ridiculous that I want to see how they would handle an adventure.

 

[Duleigh]

My characters Andi and Paul have a pair of twin 5-year-old daughters, Sandy and Madeline who were just there to give some needed exposition credibility. I modeled them after some children I'm related to. They immediately took over the story. If there's a chapter where they didn't do something to grab the readers attention, my readers want to know if they're ok. They developed their own personalities (Sandy recently took a bloody rag to show and tell because her dog was shot, her sister took a cop). This year they sent out Christmas emails to a few lucky readers.

 

[WCSGarland]

I've got a main character that I feel sorry for. Stupid bastard keeps wanting to end up with a spectacularly ugly death.

 

[sinfantasy]

I wrote a 5k-word story but it was too monotonous so I expanded it to 20k. In the process, one of the side characters took the burden of carrying some plot devices. Things kept adding up and now I have a 34k-word story. It has come a long way from the 5k draft and is a much better story now.

The rub is, I am not happy with the whole thing anymore. So yeah, in a way, my imaginary characters are protesting to get the attention and a chance to show they are capable of much more.

It's kid of stupid... or maybe I am just not ready for long stories yet... or I need to learn how to plan the story... but I would rather scrap the whole thing and write it again than post something I am not happy about.

 

[lovecraft68]

I created a character who's nickname in my BDSM group the Circle was Persephone. The top dog in the group and feared as much, if not more, than respected. A reputed witch with a dangerous reputation gained by people tending to disappear if anyone screwed with her or her Fetish club The Black Flame in Chicago.

She was never supposed to 'exist' in the actual story, she was a device to create a storyline of the members of the group having to cover up some serious rule breaking. She was the Devil in their world a shadowy figure one just didn't want to run the risk of meeting under the wrong terms.

But while I was working on my Siblings with Benefits series which would ultimately lead into the Circle novels through the brother, I did a Halloween one shot and decided to have them travel to The Black Flame and meet Persephone for a invite only orgy/ritual. Her real name is Abigail Lefay (a slightly different spelling of the King Diamond album character Abigail) There was something about the character, which I admittedly screwed up on and had her a little too playful even though her and the brother had been friends for years, and I wanted to do a little more with her, and capture who she really was, a not entirely sane dangerous individual.

I brought her back for the violent and bloody finale of the series and got the correct portrayal this time and found myself giving her a horrific origin story to explain her current behavior and actions. That wasn't enough, this character would not get out of my head, nor would her lover, a former black ops agent turned killer for hire/bodyguard Nicole aka Medusa, and her adopted mother and aunt.

I'm currently halfway through the fourth full length novel in what I project to be six book series if I can ever finish it.

All from a simple thought of "I need a big bad to strike fear into people."

 

[Belegon]

I've had this happen... in my one published novel, I had a character who was originally just the bodyguard of the male lead become a fairly major character and his background that I devised for him actually added immensely to the overall "bible" of the universe. The novel is an erotic romance vampire urban fantasy and the characterization of the male lead rapidly grew deeper once I finally identified him. (I used a long deceased historical figure as my male lead.) After Alex was identified, it linked quite easily into a deeper backstory for his bodyguard, who started as little more than a cameo style appearance but soon grew into a major supporting character in the story, with his background adding a great deal of historical gravitas to my legendarium.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

I just randomly ran across this topic while looking for something else. The topic is exactly where "Wager" came from. The heroine there was a minor supporting character in a different story, who ended up being cut, because "Pranked" was meant to be a fast-paced adventure story.

But I couldn't let her go. Maureen was just too interesting (and trope-violating) a character. So "Wager".

-Annie

 

[NuclearFairy]

I've had a lot of stories run through my head that I've never bothered writing down. In one of them I had a dwarf who had been raised in a highly misogynistic society and hated it. He was trying to figure out how to change it and find someone who actually suited him so he struck up a friendship with a harpy. After a tiring sparing match with the harpy he asked her, "How can someone so delicate looking be so strong." Her response was, "Well my dad was a merman, but I don't think that has anything to do with it."

Which entirely derailed that story in my head as I wondered how a merman and a harpy could get together, and well now I'm writing a story about that harpy's father and have no plans to write the story about the dwarf.

 

[RetroFan]

I've had this more with non-erotic characters.

For example, Todd in my story series 'The PTA Queen Bee & the Teen Rebel' ended up getting more page space allocated to him than when I started writing the stories because he was so amusing and fun to write about. A buffoonish, cartoon-like bully of 300 pounds, Todd is so stupid that he thinks about himself in the third person and gets himself into no end of trouble owing to his bullying ways, lack of intelligence, his gluttony and laziness. Todd is so slow-witted that once when one of his sisters made a jibe about him looking like the Hindenburg, it took Todd over half an hour to work out this was an insult to him for being overweight and getting angry about it.