Do you like your characters?

[TamTam]

OK, I got the idea for this thread after reading Stephen King's "On Writing." He wrote that he actually didn't like Carrie White while writing "Carrie." He thought that she was wimpy and too different from himself.

I got to thinking about my own characters. I do like pretty much all my characters, even though they may be strange or abrupt or whatever. Even my villians, I may not like per se, but I understand them, at least.

So, how much do you like your characters?

[Anareth]

Hm. Honestly, sometimes I like them, sometimes I want to smack them. Rather like having children, I imagine. And I have my teacher's pets/favorite children, who while they can ICly do wrong, really do no wrong in my eyes, and whom I can't permanently hurt. (Note I said 'permanently.' Short-term, they're most likely to get the crap kicked out of them.)

I have plenty of second-stringers I don't like, but that's becauase you're not supposed to like them.

[Wolfegar]

Do they like me? Not after what I did.

I like...some of them...sometimes. Some of them are really asking for it though.

[AnnMarie]

SOme I love to hate. Does that count?


No, I can honestly say I have characters I absolutely detest. Usually they are composites of personalities I just want to kick the balls off of.

[McClance]

I like most of my characters.

In fact, almost every one of my "good guy" characters in my earlier stories were likable and practically every "bad guy" character was unremarkable.

Now, though, I'm starting to create some annoying "good guy" characters. For example, in one series where I have Earth fighting a Fourth World War, I gave the main ship of the series an arrogant captain far from likable.

And, I have also recently created some antagonist that are more interesting and quite dislikable now--which is why they are antagonists.

[Feena_bronze_rider]

OK, I got the idea for this thread after reading Stephen King's "On Writing." He wrote that he actually didn't like Carrie White while writing "Carrie." He thought that she was wimpy and too different from himself.

I got to thinking about my own characters. I do like pretty much all my characters, even though they may be strange or abrupt or whatever. Even my villians, I may not like per se, but I understand them, at least.

So, how much do you like your characters?
I usually end up preferring my villains over my heros....

[TamTam]

I usually end up preferring my villains over my heros....
I gotta agree with you there. Villians can be so much fun to write. :D

[Lady Legira]

I love my villain so much I use her for my name :D

[Feena_bronze_rider]

I've not gone that far yet! HA! But the name Toa-kimi-so does sound good! HA!

[Zei]

OK, I got the idea for this thread after reading Stephen King's "On Writing." He wrote that he actually didn't like Carrie White while writing "Carrie." He thought that she was wimpy and too different from himself.

I got to thinking about my own characters. I do like pretty much all my characters, even though they may be strange or abrupt or whatever. Even my villians, I may not like per se, but I understand them, at least.

So, how much do you like your characters?

I find it extremely hard to hate my own characters...because they're my special little darlings. :evil:

[Monkeysrule]

The only one I hate is the lazy one, who is not really an antagonist but is more of a nuicance to the other characters.

[Bronze-Dragonrider]

Some of my older characters I've written I do not like because they were so poorly characterized. In my newer stories, I try my best to charactarize them well and make them likeable without making them seem Mary-Sue. So I like my characters, but I don't overly love them or hate them.

[Keita]

Some of them I love, others I love to hate. But actually hate them? Naw! I'm not about to drive myself crazy by writing somebody I hated! :D

[Monkeysrule]

In the Pern fanfic I'm writing, I have no human antagonists. And I love every character (esp. Aideth :heartbeat )

[Monkeysrule]

And Zolen and Threll.

[Vyon]

I haven't the energy to make someone I really hate. The exceptions are some of the Gelf family in my SF whodunnit, though they're being set up. They didn't do it. The nastiest one is going to finish up dead. But that's yet another unfinished project. Mostly because I still don't know exactly whodunnit myself. I didn't have an outline for that story. Every time I set a character up, he finishes up in the bottom of a ravine, or full of poison darts or something like that.

If I get lukewarm about a character the story dies. So if I'm sick of David Gelf and Kail Magaba, or Lil and Sevener and co of my fanfic, then I add yet another unfinished manuscript to the pile.

So, yes, I do like my characters, otherwise I don't get anywhere with them. :roll:

[Staerwyen]

I have one character that I utterly detest......funny part he'sthe hero in two of my current stories. He's one of those guys that if he was in real life he'd be as close to perfect as you can get and still be believable. I think thats why I dont like him. *shrugs*

[queenrider melody]

In one of my Pern fanfics that I'm working on, I really detest the guy who I made the Lord Holder of Southern Hold, Lord Kaltane. He's a bit... umm... emotional and demanding. I also have a bit of a love/hate thought about the Weyrwoman, Lilac. She's just too sweet and too, stereo type. :crazy:

[RobinBradbery]

.... Usually they are composites of personalities I just want to kick the balls off of.

But, tell us how you really feel. :hopping:

[AnnMarie]

But, tell us how you really feel. :hopping:
LOL RObin. I'm not known for wearing kid gloves.

Point in case, though, is Cadarn, from OISINN DROICHT. He's good looking, rich, moderately intelligent....

he is also lazy, thinks the world owes him whatever he wants, and figures if he can just get rid of the hero, the heroine will fall all over him instead. His character was drawn from a stalker, an ex-boyfriend, and a classmate who thought the world owed him a life without him having to lift a finger. Aggrivating sods, all three of them. They make a really pathtic character together.

[Lady Faizah]

Do I like my characters? Hmm... Well, that's a tough one.

Mostly, I guess you could say I like my characters. Most of my characters, I'd rather not have to see them dead, but I don't mind torturing them from time to time.

There are a special few that I either really like, or really dislike. I won't kill any of these characters, either because I like them too much to let them go, or because I dislike them enough to prolong their suffering. :evil:

Somehow, I've managed to avoid writing 'bad' guys thus far, but I've included both characters I like and dislike among the 'good' guys. Unfortunately, I no longer have any examples, as my computer died recently, taking all my stories-in-progress with it.

[Bane]

My liking my characters depends wholly on what they do in the story. I've read Stephen King's On Writing, and I found that I write much the same way he does. I let the characters live in the story. I let them do their wn things. I pretty much become the characters, and when I pull out of it, there are those I want to smack, and those I want to kiss. But the story has very rarely been a bad story when I write like that. It's when I write in a different way that you can tell I wasn't there.

[Levallia]

Like my charcters? Most of them, yes.

My user name is the name of the main character in the story I'm working on now. I like most of the characters, though I don't always like what they do. But what can I say about that? I make them do those things! Most of them are modelled on real people, but some are TOTAL fiction, like the guy that's gonna' show up in the 2nd or 3rd story, who is based on my idea of the PERFECT guy (not the dorky kind of perfect, the 'tall, dark, and handsome 'perfect').

The villains, however, are the most detestable scum-bags I could imagine. All of them are based on people I know in real life (the main villain of the above mentioned series is based on the one person I hate MOST and even bears a distorted version of the vile wretch's name :devil: ). They are despicable and I hate them; but that's what villains are for right? :evil: :darkside:

[Vyon]

Not always. They don't have to be totally evil, just naughty enough to get in the way of the heroes. That's one reason why they can be so much more fun to write.

[Grey Bear]

Oh God, no. I find that if you like your characters too much, you end up creating MAry and Gary-Stus. Yuck. Thats why I create characters with as many flaws as possible. I've even created some real nasty pieces of work and made them the hero or sidekick. That Damned Talent Fanfic had, as one of its major Talent characters, a woman who wasn't averse to sleeping her way to the top as well as a vile streak of arrogance that she passed off as confidence, etc. I don't like the "strong ambitious" types. When I see ambition, I see "something about this person isn't quite right" and thus I have to create some nasty little feature about this person to sour the milk later on.

The character I hate the most, incidentally, is one of my friends favourites. She's whiny, self-obsessed, completely unsure of herself, makes everyone around her hate her and at one point is nearly attacked by one of the other characters in a drunken rage. I based her on a person I really despise, but apparently she's my best-written character. Go figure.

GB

[Rabble]

Hm. Honestly, sometimes I like them, sometimes I want to smack them. Rather like having children, I imagine. And I have my teacher's pets/favorite children, who while they can ICly do wrong, really do no wrong in my eyes, and whom I can't permanently hurt. (Note I said 'permanently.' Short-term, they're most likely to get the crap kicked out of them.)
Hmm, perhaps this explains why some of my most loved characters have managed to pick up so many scars... :disguise:

[Brenda]

That Damned Talent Fanfic had, as one of its major Talent characters, a woman who wasn't averse to sleeping her way to the top as well as a vile streak of arrogance that she passed off as confidence, etc. I don't like the "strong ambitious" types. When I see ambition, I see "something about this person isn't quite right" and thus I have to create some nasty little feature about this person to sour the milk later on.

The character I hate the most, incidentally, is one of my friends favourites. She's whiny, self-obsessed, completely unsure of herself, makes everyone around her hate her and at one point is nearly attacked by one of the other characters in a drunken rage. I based her on a person I really despise, but apparently she's my best-written character. Go figure.

GB
What fanfic was that?

[Grey Bear]

What fanfic was that?

It was infamous in my writer's group for being "the Fanfic GB never completed". It had everything - science fiction/cyberpunk mixed with hefty, almost choking doses of Scottish mythology (where the fairies are evil, carry swords and will kill you, where the elves are nothing more than psychopathic monsters who can throw trucks across motorways), some nasty horror sequences (I literally swiped the Willow-flaying-skin-off thing from Buffy the Vampire Slayer for one of my less likeable characters), a large dose of violence and what my friend Xav calls "a healthy dislike of Talent canon". The characters, well, the Talents, had to face up to either destroying or assisting a genetically engineered subgroup of Talents who were a, more powerful than the Primes, b, slightly sociopathic and c, highly volatile. Add in the much-loved plot device I call "You don't know who the good guys or the bad guys are" (for instance - one of the genetically engineered Talents does what she does because she's fighting to save her daughter's life, another does what he does because he wants to ensure a future for both the GM and non-GM Talents). I don't write black and white characters - I love nuance in characters. Its probably one of the reasons why I don't like the Pern books - its too easy to assign "Good" and "Bad" to the characters.

To finish - I will say the Talent fanfic was probably the only Talent fanfic out there with poledancing Talents. And nine-year-old children who could spin sword blades around at such speeds to deflect an entire round from a Gatling gun. Meh, such fun :D

GB

[anonew]

I remember when he was writing that. You used to get these brilliant questions being posted on the KT, such as 'how fast would you have to spin a sword to deflect all the bullets from a machine gun?' (as alluded to above). That one was slightly scary in that there seemed to be a fair number of people who could quote, without apparently looking anything up, the muzzle velocity, cartridge capacity, calibre etc of a surprising number of small arms. I have a hard time remembering that the end without a handle points at the bad guy.

To answer the question, though, I try not to get attached to characters too much. What if you have to kill one off? That said, almost all of my main protagonists have a penchant for sarcasm and cracking wise, and it's hard not to like a character that gives you the chance to be as much of a smart-mouthed git as you want. :evil:

G

[McClance]

To answer the question, though, I try not to get attached to characters too much. What if you have to kill one off?
G

Well, that's not a problem for me. In the series that I have been writing recently, 4 out of the 7 or 8 main characters that I started the series off with are dead by the time it's over--including one of my special characters (named McClance).

[Grey Bear]

If a character peeves me off, then they'll suffer. If they really annoy me, I'll bump 'em off. I feel no shame for doing it - they're not real.

I do have to point out though, kiddies, that the Kylaras of this world don't always end up as some STD-ridden, mentally snapped harpie with faded looks.

They often turn into Cher.

GB

[Brenda]

I don't think I've ever read any of your stories, GB. Why don't you post some here? And why don't you finish that one with the crazy Scottish Talents? It sounds like fun!