Detaching yourself from your characters

Many authors I know speak about their characters "taking a life of their own" (or at least attempting to). However, this has never happened to me: no matter what characters I write or how long I develop them, they always remain increasingly complex constructs with predefined functions. That means, at any given moment in the story, I know exactly how they tick and what drives them, and because of that, I cannot really see them as real people.

By comparison, when I read others' works, I mostly have no idea what is going on inside their characters' heads, so to me, they appear much more lifelike. If I write fanfiction about them, there is always an element of uncertainity and personal interpretation about it, because they are not my characters and I feel sufficiently detached from them to see them as individuals. From the feedback I got about my writing, my readers appear to perceive my own characters in pretty much the same "detached" way as I perceive others', so it must be a POV thing (author vs. reader). I do sometimes get glimpses of surprise from my characters when I add an unexpected trait to their characterization but said surprise disappears as soon as I work this trait into their general concept or discard it if I cannot fit it in.

So I was wondering, are there any nifty tricks to detach yourself from your characters and view them as if they were someone else's? And how much does it help to view them as individuals and, more importantly, to write them believably?

Have you tried chatting with your characters like invisible friends? That's what I do. Like when I go home from school or when I have to make difficult decision and ask them what they think.

Help?.. please...

An interesting idea, I didn't think of it.  ^{lame-ass excuse}

I will try doing that, thank you. Any other tips?

edited 28th Dec '10 4:58:15 AM by Koveras

Characters have always been a problem for me. One thing I do know is that you can change a plot to suit a character, but you can't change a character to suit a plot. Circumstances change all the time; people change rarely, if at all. So people drive your story. Once you have good characters, your story should almost write itself.

Some of my characters have taken on lives of their own. Right now one of them is demanding that I finish her book, and she's not the type to take no for an answer. The common denominator seems to be that they are in impossible situations that they have to get themselves out of, that is, nobody else can or will do it for them. I suppose they are the sort of person I would like to be, because they do get out of those impossible situations.

My advice is to base a character on someone you know (or know of). Change some traits so that he/she isn't an obvious knockoff. That way you get the "detachment" you feel with a fanfic character. Do enough tinkering with characters and eventually they'll begin to resonate for you.

Under World. It rocks!

Yes, Write Who You Know is a good advice in any case. Unfortunately, the people I know well are unsuited for stories I like to write, and vice versa. I consider my situation rather unfortunate in that the people I regularly communicate with share many professional and personal traits with me but there is almost no intersection of interests. In short, I don't want to write about people I know, so the "write what you know" collides with "write what you like" maxim in my case... I do often resort to making compound characters by merging several people I know together, but this is pretty much the same as writing new ones from scratch.

edited 28th Dec '10 7:58:23 AM by Koveras

Just make a scenario, and let the characters go in it. Let it be character driven, and just let them talk. Go to the mall, try and figure out what your characters would like/hate/do in each store.

Read my stories!

Maybe using a Noodle Incident where even you don't know what happened? Doesn't seem practical, but...

Or maybe, think that one of your characters wakes himself up to find himself in a universe of another work, and act his reactions in your head. But make certain you act as him, and your only thoughts are his thoughts. If you don't know how he'd do at some point, just make up something on the spot, and find a reason later.

What I meant by "people you know of" is fictional characters. Start with one or two or three characters that you like, swap out some traits, change the name, and there you go. Remember, at some point they were based on real people.

Under World. It rocks!

You must increase the complexity of your characters for them to become unpredictable. Think about real people and how complicated everyone is; think about the whole range of your own personality, how it can be so different depending upon your mood, your situation, who you're with, etc. The more depth and complexity you add to them, the more potential you have to surprise yourself and your reader by having them react differently to a situation than you'd expect (and having it come off as believable, nonetheless).

Daydreaming always helped me breath life into my characters. The mind roams and when it derails your plans in a quick fit of inspiration, it will more often than not be an improvement.

I've got new mythological machinery, and very handsome supernatural scenery. Goodfae: a mafia web serial

Think of them as tools - or workers that you never interact with, only had directions to. I use the former more often.

Half-Life: Dual Nature, a crossover story of reasonably sized proportions.

I'd go with "you don't need to see them as individuals." So long as you've got an idea of how they act, you can just put them in a situation and have them react accordingly. The only problem is if you have them change in an unrealistic fashion to railroad them along a predetermined plot, which doesn't sound like something you'd do.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

Wow, so many replies. ^^;

@Mr AHR: I will try doing that, thanks. Actually, that will quickly devolve into comedy because each character in my current WIP (except the protagonist) cannot stand at least one other, and since I won't allow bloodshed, there will be much bickering.

@Dealan: I thought of that, too, but I don't think that will help. As the author, I must know what experiences made the character the way s/he is, in order to see what other consequences they may have had for them. By the time I write down the impact a "Noodle Incident" had on their lives, I already know pretty well what it was all about.

The alternate universe advice is sound, however. I will try to write something like this.

@Ralph Crown: Ah, OK. ^^ Actually, I already do something like that by determining post-factum which existing characters my own creations appear to be based upon. However, since I usually don't plan it in advance, it often happens that the character concepts evolve and they become less and less similar to their "prototypes"...

@Flayer: I have thought of that, too. Unfortunately, when I increase the complexity of a character, I always get the feeling that the concept is gonna fall apart, and the character becomes just a dry heap of unrelated traits and tropes. Also, while the characters are living beings in my story, I am still the one who has to write them and I cannot keep all their quirks in my head if they are too complex. If I try, it usually results in inconsistency in the long run.

@KSPAM: Yeah, I do that all the time myself, too: imagining scenes featuring the characters and how they are gonna interact and react to certain circumstances. However, most of the time, scenes I imagine in the dreamy state make no sense once put on paper. -__-'

@Jack Mackerel: That's what I have done in my previous writing. However, said writing mostly consisted of short stories and it is much easier to create characters specifically suited for a short story and think of them as tools, rather than do the same thing in a longer piece, which I am currently attempting. In a short story, I can always tweak both the character and the plot to fit each other and it will still stay consistent because it's short, but in a novel, I need a deterrent to prevent me from altering my characters "on the fly", which is why I am trying to find by detaching myself from them.

@feotakahari: Yes, that was my philosophy until now (see above). Now, however, I find it difficult to locate the middle ground between making characters perfectly suited for the story (which unnecessarily simplifies the conflicts) and being tempted to rewrite them when they go in the direction I didn't want them to go (an alternative to which would be railroading them into the plot, as you said).