I started thinking about this after reading the "adopt a character" thread on HWSF.

How do you guys feel about the concept of other writers' (with your permission of
course) using your characters (most likely in a minor role) in their work? Do you use your friends' characters in your work?

Just for the record, this is idle curiosity; I probably won't do this with anyone's characters in the near future, and I'd be leery about putting my seal of approval on someone else's doing it with mine, although since my main WIP at the moment is Alternate History of a sort, there's plenty of room for alternate versions of other people's characters to appear without causing continuity problems with their own authors' works, if I wanted to do it that way.

It is definitely an interesting concept. If I were to do something like this I'd probably only do it with a walk-on character and make sure it was impossible to make the connection between the characters. It would be an easter-egg kind of thing.

My mentor and I were talking yesterday, and he said that George Lucas and Stephen Spielburg were close friends and always included an element from each other's films in their work. So I think something like this would be cool!

Example, the E.T aliens in one of the Prequel movies, and E.T's familiarity with Yoda.

I hadn't thought about doing this with other people's characters, unless they were the same universe, like Star Wars or Star Trek. However, I think it's a good idea for shared universe stories like the Starsailer project on HWSF.

This is something I'm generally in favor of---so long as this doesn't spoil the story for readers who are unfamiliar with the "originals"---even more broadly than mere cameos by other authors' characters, but extending even to trips into other authors' worlds. But I wouldn't want to try it myself except in cases where the author is either long dead (i.e. the works are public domain) or available to critique my portrayal (and approving of the "crossover"), and I'm leery of others borrowing my characters, settings, etc., unless I've learned to trust their intuition and portrayals.

Personally, I'd probably be hesitant to lend some of my characters, because in most of my stories, my characters are my stories. However, I think that using a lesser character who's intriguing could be fascinating in a sort of brother/sister series. For example, I have a character in one story, Iolander, who is a semi-main character. However, at the end of the story he's very young with a complex life, so a continuation of his story might be good, but I don't know how I'd feel about someone who doesn't "know" him like I do writing as him. So I don't have a problem with it, I would just be hesitant to lend myself. Also, due to potential difficulties in accurately portraying someone else's character, I personally wouldn't borrow a character just due to these challenges. However in many cases I think it could be interesting and good.

As a project just for fun, I have no problems with it. In something more serious (i.e. hoping to be published) I'd be a little more cautious.

Although: one of my fantasy worlds (and possibly two) and one of Arien's worlds exist in the same multi-verse, and one of my favorite characters is almost certainly going to show up in at least one of Arien's stories. So crossovers between our works may end up being somewhat normal, although I expect most crossovers would just be written for fun.

Indeed. Caution is almost always wise when dealing with something that's going to involve real money.

But a principle I picked up in a workshop I attended on copyright law for folk musicians might be useful here: It's fairly common practice for a professional or semi-professional folk musician to let others in the same position who are his friends play his original song (or one of his arrangements) on their albums, in return for them letting him use one of their songs on one of his albums. While the situation is not the same in fiction (using a charater or a setting in a novel is vastly different from just playing a song on an album), so I'd want to have some sort of quality control and otherwise be in on the process, I think a "swap" like this could be a reasonable arrangement.

I think this would be a fun idea if you were writing a satire, or something. I myself probably wouldn't allow it, as I am quite picky with myself about writing my characters accurately, and no one else can get inside their heads the way I can.