Have you ever started writing a character..........

Have you ever started writing a character not planning for them to have much of a role at first. But the more you write them, the more potential you find in them and grow to like them. Then they ended up with a much more major role later?

It's a little like Ensemble Dark Horse, but not too much.

I started an entire STORY because of this.

Yes. I once had a character I intended to only be a one scene incidental character evolve into becoming a major antagonist. I didn't even plan on giving him a personality. He was supposed to appear only once, being a representative of the world's attitudes towards the main character, then leave. But as I was writing him, he just oozed character, and the plight he was in made him seem like a very relatable character. After the scene ended, I thought he was so fascinating, that I had to come up with an excuse to use him again. So I wrote another scene with the guy, this time giving him a much larger role and even a comedic sidekick. I ended up liking the sidekick as well, and these two characters had such a great chemistry, that I decided that they should fill the villainous roles that I've been needing.

Several of my characters now were far more like background fluff than anything else in earlier iterations of Endless Conflict.

Among them: Daniel, Colonel Barry Smith, Jessie, MistressBellah, and Samantha Watkins.

They all had seemingly much lesser roles earlier than I have for them now. (And considering how much story I've written now with the new roles, it was all for the better.)

Yes. This happened to a character who Really Gets Around whose role expanded the more and more I wrote her, probably because I never quite wrote a character like her before, although my only reader hates her with a fiery passion because of her promiscuousness...oh well.

Harry Dage was supposed to be a one-time event, but ended up living all the way to the story's final segment before being killed.

All the time. I initially planned for my character Aidan to be a Howl-type love interest, but he wound up getting much more development than the rest of the story, so ultimately I revamped him and made him the protagonist. Now he's the spotlight-stealing lead in my feeble new comic, Red Right Hand.

I started writing a character called Ryan Halloway, who was a talking british skeleton in a tophat and a coat and tails, as one of the side-characters in a story. He soon took the story over and spawned legions of other stories because he is so awesome.

I tend to write a lot of spinoffs of stories because I'll often write characters that I really like but I have limited use for them in whatever story I'm writing at the time. Rarely do I actually give a character a much-expanded role than what I planned for them in the story they came from, but it does happen.

That's how my Big Bad came to be. He started off as an every day bad ass mercenary, but over time, he developed into The Dragon. Soon after, I realized that my as-of-then Big Bad would work better as a Hero who was forced into politics and had to appear evil in order to keep his country together.

Oh, and there's my Butt-Monkey. He started off in a supplementary short-story that would explain the events at the beginning of my novel. I couldn't help myself though, he had so much personality that I made him into one of the narrators in my novel.

edited 18th Oct '10 2:07:05 PM by BudZer

A story I started when I was fourteen went completely off the rails when I decided to flesh out the protagonist's older brother. Suddenly he was the only character that I liked. (And no, I couldn't just make him the protagonist; he was a semi-villain - too evil to be a hero, too good to be a Villain Protagonist.)

It killed the damn story!

So beware.

Isn't this Ascended Extra?

The protagonist of my story, now a round character, started out purely as a way of illustrating the power of the antagonist, who is now in retrospect pretty flat.

Many a character has come into their own in my writings, often appearing in prequels, sequels, sidequels etc.

I almost forgot to mention. Death was a sidecharacter in one of my stories, as well. Now she has several where she is the main character.

Zaran, in a way. Long story short, I've had plans for an LHP-esque comic for a while, and changed multiple details along the way. The original version didn't have Zaran. However, in one story the protagonists were supposed to accidentally summon a demon. The demon was nothing like Zaran at this point (he was genuinely evil, just horribly bad at it). However, I though he was pretty funny, and made him a recurring character who would appear pretty often, but mostly for gags. In the final version I removed some extra characters and combined some of them with other characters to reduce the size of the cast. For some reason I can't quite remember, I combined the demon with a female character who wasn't one of the main protagonists, but was still quite important to the plot. The result was a demon with the female character's personality (this is why I sometimes say Zaran is party based on a real person, as the female character in question was based on a girl I've known). She ended up becoming the only protagnist with a detailed backstory (mostly because I felt she needed more of an explanation than the others, whose backstories were largely inconsequential to who they were), and eventually became the Zaran you know. Now she has a spinoff comic that I've actually started drawing, while LHP is still waiting to be made (that isn't really Zaran's fault tho. I'd still love to make it but I feel I'd need to learn to draw better first).

Given the way I tend to treat my characters, this tends to be very bad news for any soul unfortunate enough to achieve Ascended Extra status. The most recent case was of a single-scene exposition-dispenser who got turned into a nasty Smug Snake who plunged a whole quarter-galaxy into chaos, deliberately (and successfully) arranged the deaths of two major characters, got an astonishing number of his own troops killed by having a nervous breakdown in the middle of battle, and was later revealed to be either deliberately or accidentally responsible for several atrocities in the past, including a WMD detonation in the middle of a major city. He was eventually subjected to a spectacular Humiliation Conga that culminated in his own superior officers pulling strings to ensure that the legal costs from the Kangaroo Court they were shoving him through would bankrupt him several times over.

So... yeah.

edited 19th Oct '10 2:39:09 AM by Iaculus

This happens to me all the time. In my main project, a character that was originally thought as an one-time villain who only existed to fill a blank space became the main villain of the story, having a major role in the series as a whole.

About the same thing happened with a pair of siblings, which were planned as just a pair of mercenaries that caused a lot of trouble to the heroes, never becoming something more than minions. They now play a much larger role in the story, and in a way are responsible for resolving the climax.

The inverse has happened too- a character that was going to have a huge role in the story, being one of the heroes' major allies, eventually revealed to be The Mole and The Starscream, is now barely important to mention. He only serves to create a plot point, and I'm trying to find a way to remove him from the story altogether.

Finally, my second main project, one character that was just a minor good guy is now arguably the Hero of the entire series.

edited 19th Oct '10 10:59:47 AM by Dealan

This happened to me. A one-shot Well-Intentioned Extremist who did not recognize that Evil Is Not a Toy suddenly transformed into an immortal Implacable Shapeshifter employed by the original chaos and who would eventually betray and usurp his master and come damn near closer to destroying the world than any Elder God ever did.

Just because I took a look at that one dude and said to myself, "Wouldn't he be much more awesome if I added in a whole boatload of crazy?"

^ Wouldn't we all be more awesome with an extra boatload of crazy?

The character I originally had as the villain for my first D&D campaign ended up being my screen name here... and in other places.

And it's safe to say that he is a pretty huge concept in my mind by now, with his motif's running through many, many stories that I write.

No we would just be at different levels of death.

Anyways, Rainar when he first started off in the Character Hotel thread was like this to me. At first I had no real plans as to what he would be like, except being dwarven. Eventually I sort of grew fond of his character, and now I have an outline for some work of fiction I could write him in. (I don't know how long it will be)

I intended my one-time character Diachii to assist the hero as a new student then never use him again, but I ended up using him more than once as the hero's side-kick and then he ended up as the potential love interest and related to one of the major characters, so... side tracked much? I liked him though.

edited 19th Oct '10 9:00:25 PM by sabrina_diamond

Shouji was supposed to be just a mentor figure to the heroes in Demon Hunters: After Dark. Reading the latest in the RP shows the darkness lurking behind a friendly smile.

I do this all the time.

Just go ask my character Wladyslaw Piastovsky