Hi Cassie! I was wondering what your relationship with your characters is like. Do you view them as your friends, your children, your creations or something else? I feel such a deep connection as a reader and I can’t imagine how much deeper that goes as an author!🩷
This is such a lovely question.
I don't think my relationship with characters is quite like having children or friends, because those are relationships with real people. Characters are something stranger than that. They're part of the toolkit of telling a story, but they're also repositories for things I've observed, experienced, wondered about, or imagined. They often contain pieces of people I've known, pieces of myself, and pieces that are entirely invented.
Sometimes I think they're a bit like diary entries: snapshots of thoughts and feelings I had at a particular time. Sometimes they're more like the imaginary friends I had as a kid. I traveled constantly when I was young, and I spent a lot of time inventing companions. I knew they weren't real, but I invested enough imagination in them that they became deeply meaningful to me. Characters feel a little like that. I know they are not real but the work put into them makes them important.
My relationship with them is also very different from a reader's relationship. Readers have the wonderful ability to experience a character almost as though they're meeting another person. I don't, because I know how they're built. People often ask me, "How's Ty doing right now?" and my honest answer is that he's not doing anything unless I'm writing him doing it. He's not lonely or waiting for me; he's simply not in motion until the story begins again.
I think that's probably the biggest difference between being the author and being the reader. Readers get to believe in the reality of the characters. Authors can always change those characters in a way actual people cannot be changed or altered and that power over them is a constant reminder that in fact, they are not real but serve the same thing you, the writer, do: the story overall. In some ways it's a bit sad we never get to experience them like you do!
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