They’re your intellectual children, aren’t they? Maybe without the measles and the sibling quarrels and the poor choices in teenage dates, but still — if you’re like me — you’re fond of them. Good thing, cuz you created them and are thus, in some sense, responsible for them. Even the ones who turned out wrong, well, you understand why — none better.
Don’t know about you, but I read my own old novels occasionally, just to visit with my family, like leafing through a photo album. The temptation might be to regret the clumsiness of your brain in shaping the character, now that you have more experience with sub-creation, but I shrug and think of the random genetics that create real children. However they turn out, at some point you think of them as fully formed — they cannot be other than they are. Not now, anyway.
You yourself may be significantly older than you were when you created them, and you may now be able to understand their characters better than you did when you first presented them to the world. Be that as it may, they’re on their own now.
How do you think of your own fictional “kids”, human or otherwise? Do you wish you could tinker with them? Or are they just tools under your control, in service of the plot? Do you discuss potential follow-on series entries with them and bounce your ideas off their heads? Does their advice surprise you?
Mad Genius Club 
5 responses to “Your Fondness and Regrets for the Characters You Create”
I have a great affection for most if not all of them. When I find they have to go on their way and on their lives without me, I can get very sad.
I generally write protagonists I’d like to chat with in real life. The exception might be Rada Ni Drako – she’s very hard, for good reasons. But writing her story let me get a lot of old pain out of my system, even though she and Joschka von Hohen-Drachenburg confounded several plot arcs and forced major retconning! *shakes paw at characters*
I ended that series early, to give them a “happily ever after as far as anyone knows.” I think readers prefer that, even if the author knows that things might be different.
I mostly don’t like looking back at my first fiction book, except for one moment in the writing. A character suddenly wanted to do something that my conscious brain had not seen coming. It was right. It was the perfect thing. It was completely in character. It shocked me totally. But after that I did believe that writing fiction was possible for me.
I think some of mine have gotten tired of my manipulative ways, and stopped talking to me. Except Xen. He just says he likes my new stuff, and to keep going.
I really think writers are deliberate (and reasonably functional) split personalities.
I’m usually pretty tired of my characters by the time I’m done with them, but then I go back years later and read them and like them all over again.