Do you get too close to your characters?
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- cdisenberg
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Do you get too close to your characters?
I do tend to get into my characters a bit too much and have found it hard to remove or kill a character off if it is needed in the story line. This causes my objectivity to be skewed as I write.
I do think trying to "become " the characters can be helpful as well and help you develop deep and rich characters. But, it can be a really fine line to walk as you write.
― Ernest Hemingway
- Alden Loveshade
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As for killing them off, I usually give them a way out. It's hard for me to even pretend to kill someone unless I'm really mad or they're a sleb (member of the universal Sinister League of Evil Badguys; i.e. an unrealistic bad guy you can recognize as a bad guy in the first five seconds).
Jim Brewer, Cleveland, O. (also attributed to Groucho Marx)
- darlaflick
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-- 23 Sep 2014, 05:38 --
I can't in fact I have only ever finished writing one story but I have noticed that some of my ideas fit into others and then I combine the ideas. I usually don't fully write it out but a paragraph to remind myself what I thought about and then when I get stuck I can look and see if one of my ideas fit into the story I am working on!
____________________________
darla
- ALynnPowers
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- SharisseEM
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- icemech04
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Doesn't make it hard for me to kill em though:)
- ALynnPowers
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- KS Crooks
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- ben-fleming
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I tend to find photos of people that look like my characters. I like them to be real. I also write a one page character profile for each, including behavioural traits of people I have met to help me make my characters more real. I wrote an unpublished murder/ crime novel 10 years ago and a friend of mine had to sleep with the light on for a month after reading it. That's the reaction I was looking for. If the character is real for you, it's easier to make it real for the reader as well. Killing characters off can be a energising part of the writing process (that's if you're not into zombies, then it's just part of the process). If you really care about a character that you need to remove, you can always write a completely different book about them at a later date!cdisenberg wrote:Have any of you gotten too close to your characters? If so why did you and how did affect your writing?
I do tend to get into my characters a bit too much and have found it hard to remove or kill a character off if it is needed in the story line. This causes my objectivity to be skewed as I write.
I do think trying to "become " the characters can be helpful as well and help you develop deep and rich characters. But, it can be a really fine line to walk as you write.
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Goodness, that must have been a scary book you wrote!!ben-fleming wrote:
I tend to find photos of people that look like my characters. I like them to be real. I also write a one page character profile for each, including behavioural traits of people I have met to help me make my characters more real. I wrote an unpublished murder/ crime novel 10 years ago and a friend of mine had to sleep with the light on for a month after reading it. That's the reaction I was looking for.
- moderntimes
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I write modern private detective novels and therefore killing off a character is necessary in this genre. I do however have a few "protected" characters, my principal narrator of course, his best pal, and a few others who reappear in each of the novels. Some secondary characters are however killed off occasionally but I shed no tears -- after all, I'm the "killer", right? ha ha
Some of my short horror stories do kill off a principal character, or at least at the end he wishes he were dead, heh heh.
But in answer to the query, no, I don't become too close to the characters in that I avoid getting them in trouble, sometimes of the fatal nature. Stuff happens, especially in modern crime fiction.