Character Question

[Alien and Sojourner in a Foreign Land]

@selah-chelyah @kathleenramm @gracie-j @erinramm @people @bob @Kevin @davis @desmond

@bernard @nova21 @we’renumberone @personsofinterest @thestrongestavenger @merrychristmas

@Anders @Ilikewhippedcream @reaganramm @LucasBobfried @devastate-lasting @morwen

@motherofTúrinTurambar @beowulfbearman

Alright. I think I got everybody. Who was your favourite character you made and why?

[Linyang Zhang]

@leon-fleming As someone who has at least 300 characters from different stories all over, this is a very hard question. 🙂

I suppose I’ll go by story here. Maybe. Or at least sift through the slightly developed ones.

(Half your tags are missing, which leads me to believe that you are tagging nonexistent people. XD)

There’s my central character from my Thirteen Ways saga. Both the hero and villain, he’s a forgettable someone known only with a number for his name and by the color of his hair. He has a savior complex, a twisted savior complex, kind of like Lelouch from Code Geass. And when he actually interacts with people, he comes off as slightly crazy. Everyone’s constantly guessing his motives, or where he’s gone off to, but they don’t realize that he’s standing in front of them.

Straying away from fantasy, we now come to my book idea-ish thing that I will get to in a couple of years about criminal organizations and the like. I have to say, I do like my three main characters for this one a lot. You’ve got Micah, a cunning leader with motives involving the circumstances around his mother’s death, his younger brother, Ethan, who is constantly racked with guilt and eventually leaves the organization so he can free himself, and Shade, a dying someone from long ago who has had everything taken away from him. I would go in-depth if asked.

I guess I like these guys a lot because their in the morally grey area, and they are each a walking paradox, much like we are. When making them (the last three, I mean) I had to come up with realistic human motivations, and I think I got some. And with the first guy, Eleven, he’s that part of my brain that thinks of things in a completely upside-down way. He doesn’t think like humans think. He’s off on a plane of his own.

Lately, it's been on my brain
Would you mind letting me know
If hours don't turn into days

[Selah CJW]

@leon-fleming

Great Scott, man, but that’s an impossible question! (To quote my character Jordan). I guess Jordan right at this moment, just bc he’s the most developed, but there’s no way I really have a favorite out of the myriads of characters I have! XD

P.S. – Do you have a fav OOTA character thus far? 😛

Also @devestate-lasting, I agree and that is super cool! 🙂

Prendre garde ~ I bleed ink

[Alien and Sojourner in a Foreign Land]

@devastate-lasting XD I see…that would be a bit of a problem. (XD And yeah, I was just messing around.)

Nice characters; er, Eleven sounds interesting. How does he talk? He sounds like he’s tall.

Sure, go in-depth.

@selah-chelyah XD Ah, yes, Jordan. Really tangled character, that one.

WEeeelll…I don’t know, really. I liked Jordan for a bit, then I preferred Francesco (I think that’s his name).

[Anonymous]

@leon-fleming You just asked the only question I can’t answer. Seriously! I wrestle with this all the time! It’s crazy!!!

So, let me see if I can make some sense…

Roughly guesstimating here…but I come up with one idea for a book just about everyday. Times that by 365, then times that by the last 3 years, so that’s around 1,095 ideas. And since I write romances, that’s about 2 main characters per idea. Of course, not all of them end up that fleshed out, but this is just to give you an idea of how many characters I have to work with. My debut novel alone has 45 characters (and, yes, I kept track of that…even the ones that didn’t have names).

So maybe I should just stick to the fleshier ones, aye?

Well, there’s Rina. And she’s #1 because she’s been with me for so long (only three years, really, but it feels like forever). I can think in her voice sometimes (and, yes, I know that’s creepy) and I feel like I know her as a real person rather than just a character. She’s so alive to me. She’s also the easiest character for me to write, since her voice comes so natural to me. (Even though we’re nothing alike…at all.) She does take the longest for me to write–phrasing each sentence just right takes forever. She’s everything that I don’t want to be and all the stereotypes of strong heroines that I hate–and yet she is perfect and all that I want in a main character, particularly one that’s staying with me for 4+ novels.

Then there’s Crimson and Elliot–and I count them as one because I wrote them both at the same time and they both came so easily and smoothly for me. It took me forever to find Crimson’s voice (she’s an odd girl), but once I did, I realized that she sounds so much like me, so it was so easy to find her balance, and I still love her because she’s a very different, very conflicted heroine who shares some of the same issues I do. (Not that I’ve ever been raped or had a miscarriage or wanted to kill myself…okay, never mind.) And Elliot is the best guy character I’ve ever written. His voice is so realistic and guy-ish, which is hard for me to obtain. I count these as favorite because although they may not be my favorite “characters,” they are my favorite voices and I LOVED writing them.

Then there’s Rhys. Rhys is my version of Rhett Butler, and that about says it all. He’s a suave, debonair playboy and gambler from high society NYC–and yet, at the same time, he’s an orphaned bastard from the slums who likes to poke fun at society. (He’s also a blockade runner and part of the KGC and a serious womanizer…with impeccable Southern gentleman manners. He’s so contradictory.)

Then there’s Kit and Chloe. (Note: Kit is a male human being. Not a girl and definitely not a cat.) I love Kit for the same reasons I love Rhys–he contradicts himself. He’s an idiot. And yet, he’s so lovable. He’s a stuffed bear with a soft heart and hard head. And Chloe is the most hilarious heroine of mine yet. Spoiled brat meets witty minx–what’s not to love?

And then there’s Lady Samantha. I haven’t written a word of her yet, because I know I’m not ready for her, but I’ve been outlining her stories for a while now, and I love her to bits and pieces. She’s like the brunette, noblewoman version of Lucy for I Love Lucy, just in genius form. She’s the comedic relief for a girl who writes about piracy. Her voice, her views, her outlooks–the way she walks the fine line between traditional and progressive, feminist and chauvinist, lowborn and blue-blood, all while having a biblical worldview–makes her so interesting and multi-faceted.

And then there’s…yeah. There are a lot, but these are the ones who stick out to me the most. (Note: Keaton and Daisy, the characters I’m currently writing, don’t make the list. I just can’t stand them. They are too contradictory. I just…ugh.)

Oh, and I can’t forget Catriona. Cat is something else, let me tell you.

And, yeah, I just stop myself right there. I’m sorry I just word vomited everywhere. Here, let me wipe my face.

[Linyang Zhang]

@selah-chelyah Ah, thank you! Even though I have no idea what you just agreed to haha

@leon-fleming When Eleven talks to people, he comes off as a bit rude because he generally brings up things that he couldn’t have known about. He never introduces himself, and switches randomly from topic to topic. And I’m afraid he’s more on the average side of things XD 5’7, 5’8, maybe?

Great. *cracks knuckles* Let me see what I can come up with…

Micah is a businessman, CEO of Rose Corp. He got into organized crime as a teenager in order to raise enough money to fund an experiment to cure a disease. There’s so much worldbuilding to explain help So long story short, illness outbreak led to shootouts and things which his mom got caught in. Then there’s Ethan, who’s vice president of the Roses. He’s seen to be the opposite of Micah; weak, shy, cowardly. In reality because he feels so much guilt over things he’s become anorexic. Eventually he leaves and becomes a private investigator, which leads him to Shade. Shade was one of the human experiments of the experiment that Micah funded as a teenager, one of the only ones to survive. He’s contracted the terminal illness himself and doesn’t have long to live. He’s not allowed to leave the town, as the town has been closed off to the outside for years now, and he can only try selling the medicine that was produced, but no one will buy it for fear of the different underworld organizations. Eventually he is consumed by anger and revenge, and decides to bring all of the organizations down.

Lately, it's been on my brain
Would you mind letting me know
If hours don't turn into days

[R.M. Archer]

[quote quote=85420]As someone who has at least 300 characters from different stories all over, this is a very hard question. 🙂[/quote]

Same here. XD I have soooo many characters to choose from. And my preference fluctuates, too, based on what I’ve been working on lately and what character types are my favorite at the moment…

But I suppose my current favorite would be the MC of my novel The Half-Elves, Leafman. (Yes, I know the name is weird. I made it up when I was seven and I’m too sentimental to change it now. XD) He’s a little bundle of angst and sass and self-absorption on the outside, but he’s mostly just a lonely sweetheart on the inside and he reminds me a lot of myself when I was in my early teens (although… I don’t think I was ever so sassy. XD) So he’s lovable in an annoying-little-brother-that-you-still-love-to-pieces way and I’m constantly torn between rolling my eyes at him and wanting to hug him. XD He’s also going to be super fun from a storytelling perspective, I think, because he has a lot of parallels with the antagonist and I’m really excited to explore how those come into play.

Speculative fiction author. Mythology nerd. Singer. Worldbuilding enthusiast.

[Selah CJW]

@leon-fleming

Lol! That’s true, I remember that now.

P.S.- are you gonna keep reading? 😛

Prendre garde ~ I bleed ink

[Riah Black]

@leon-fleming

I guess my favorite character right now (it fluctuates) is Adriaen Blackwater. He’s set in a dystopian world, and the reason I really like him is because he’s so real. I made him a flawed, raw character and I’m having so much fun working out all the angsty bits with him where he’s currently at in my story.

@selah-chelyah

Lol, prolly Giorgia (I spelled that right, didn’t I?)

Utúlië-n äure - auta í lomë

[Selah CJW]

@morwen

Aw, that’s adorable! And yep, you did, which is amazing. 😛

It’s so cool seeing who your fav characters are, peoples. XD

Prendre garde ~ I bleed ink

[E. K. Seaver]

@leon-fleming I’m late to this but I still want to join.

I’ve written several books and will just choose my favourite per book.

The Siren’s Stone (First book I ever write at 15k words. No, it will never see daylight.): Probably Dave, one of the three main characters who randomly ends up betraying everyone. (Yes, this book had no plot. Yes I got an early start at teaching my characters to betray each other.)

The Storyguard Chronicles (First full novel. May at some point get majorly reworked.): So I only wrote the first book in this series, but in the second book one of the characters died and then showed up later to have simply been brainwashed by the bad guys. His name was Cole. He was kinda stupid (Granted I was a stupid writer at the time.) but he was super snarky and it was great. And the Lead Bad Lady’s name was Elvira. She had a very tragic backstory and– Oh. I just realized some of the parallels to the Reflections. Oops.

The Reflections Trilogy: Flinn, who is an adorable little roguish sweetheart who wouldn’t hurt a fly. (Okay he kills two people to protect his crush/girlfriend but like… y’know.) Nina, who is a mysterious person with an agenda that no one else quite knows. Nathaniel, who is the sweetest character I’ve written– Okay to be honest I write really sweet, soft guys in the first book. The second book is PTSD-ridden, slightly snarky and aggressive guys, and the third books is sweet, broken guys who are prepared to die defending what they believe in.

The pen is mightier than the sword, but in a duel, I'm taking the sword.
ekseaver.wordpress.com

[Anonymous]

@e-k-seaver Girl, just reading about your characters makes my heart melt! (Plus, all those things you pinned for Flinn…like, describes him to a T. He is so adorable! And, yeah, I’m assuming he still is, if ya know what I mean.)

[E. K. Seaver]

@gracie-j, aw. 🙂 Thank you so much. (*smirks* I know what you mean.)

The pen is mightier than the sword, but in a duel, I'm taking the sword.
ekseaver.wordpress.com

[Anonymous]

@e-k-seaver Girl, you so welcome! *smirks back*

[Author]

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