Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

I should preface this by saying that I don't mean whatever went on with Laurell K Hamilton toward the end of her career, but kind of? She went down a fetid unaired BDSM room rabbit hole where any attack on her plot was somehow an attack on her friends. Which is taking it entirely too personally, but at the same time, they're hardly instruments, are they? Are there any characters you're partial enough to that they almost take on a life of their own? (It's honestly a form of authorial fetishism, but every author has these people they'd like to place on a pedestal or conversely hit with the cudgels of their voice and philosophy.)
I'm friends with some real life variation of all of my characters, but still see them as people with limited agency in my word file. Sometimes I can get very vivid ideas of what they want and where they want to be, but above all they're ruled by what's darkly funny. They live in a universe of 'oh damn' and that's that. (Even the ones in space.)
How about you, burgeoning/published writer stumbling across this message on an author/reader message board? Or you, reader; who do you suspect of trying to import their creations to consensual reality?

"Real" is a relative term where fiction is concerned. As a writer, I want my characters to appear real in my readers' heads. To that end, I have to try to make them real in my own head. By that I mean I wouldn't be surprised if I found them walking down the street someday, but in fact I know that's never going to happen. Because they live their lives entirely in my head.

I'm a discovery writer. I don't plan out characters in advance, at least not more than superficially. I learn about them as I see them in action. When Detective Lieutenant Rick Peller appeared in my first novel The Fibonacci Murders, all I knew about him was his name and rank. He became a real person over the course of two novels. (It shouldn't have taken that long, but I was a bit out of practice just then.) I'm now working on the 5th novel in the series. I consider him and the other key characters "real" today in the sense that I know them very well, and that my readers want to keep following them.

Often, characters are amalgams of real people. We pick up on how real people think and behave, and weave that knowledge (consciously or not) into our characters. Today, I can look at Peller and say there's probably more of me in him than in any other of my characters, but he's not all me. Most of my female protagonists end up being at least partly my late wife, but none of them are all her. (In fact, there is a curious thread running through Rick Peller's portrayal as he deals with the loss of his wife that probably was my preconscious brain trying to work through my own wife's illness and death.)

I tend to think that if a character isn't real--in this sense--to an author, they probably aren't going to seem real to readers. Of course, it would be another, rather disturbing matter if an author actually thought their characters were really real, walking around in the real world.

Then again, I have had the rather odd experience of writing a character in a gray Tundra pickup taking the I-70 exit to Friendsville in western Maryland...and then months later driving by that exit myself as a gray Tundra pickup exited there. ;-)