I think my sister tends to do things that way too, but I'm not sure.

I control them, and then again I don't. Perhaps you could call me the referee, or guide. My characters act out of their own personality in a very real way, to where I don't always know what a character will do right off until I write it.

Both the characters and I work together on the novel, they within it, and me on the outside. I give the situation and goal, they react. That's basically how I do it. I will create characters with general starting points in their personality, and some guidlines on how I need them to end up, but that's another topic.

OK, who voted "No, and you're crazy"?

I didn't. Cause honestly I do it all the time. Another example of writer oddity? The other day I accidentally called my cousin by my character's name.

*grimace* My charries are very real to me. *glomps them* But that movie sounds kinda sad.

Honestly, it isn't so much that my characters are...real. I don't USUALLY have voices in my head (although they do come to me and talk to me in dreams and such)...usually. Very occasionally, I do...but...generally it's just that I have them so well fleshed out I KNOW them. I know everything about them, how they act, what they would do in certain situations, and to just CHANGE that, is like creating a completely different person! It doesn't WORK!

I voted the last option.

Why did you vote the last option? I'm confused.

Edit: first option. Sorry. Typo....

For example, there was this one scene – it was at the beginning of my novel, and I had to write my novel, so I was trying write it. Anyone want to guess how many times I completely rewrote the scene? * raises eyebrows * More than 15. Not including extreme editing bouts on an already written version. I was driven absolutely insane by that scene, and I still view it with distaste whenever I think about it to this day.

I am not the person to give up, but eventually I just couldn't waste anymore time on it. I couldn't tell you what was wrong with all those scenes, but it was as if when I finished them, the rest of the story didn't belong to it – I would have to write a whole new story from that point on to what I had planned in order to keep that scene in.

Two of my characters once fell in love without telling me. Another one revealed something about their world that forced me to restart an entire story.

One of my favorite things about writing is the moment when one of your characters surprises you. You do all this planning, you add all this detail, you create their background and think you know everything there is about them when all of a sudden they do or say something that catches you off guard. They reveal a detail you've never thought of before and it turns out to be better than anything you could've planned.

Sounds like one of those moments where you needed to kill your darlings. I should know, I've had to cut out scenes I really loved and spent a lot of time crafting that didn't quite belong with the rest of the story.

* wishes there was vote for 'yes, and you're crazy' * * grins to herself *

They change with me. * tilts head *

There's an odd gap when I come across something my characters can do, but I can't.

Iri was impressed! In the background as I'm writing he kept going "Yeah, you're learning" and "oh, that's good, real good," and "I didn't know you could do that." All very sarcastically, of course, but I think he liked it.

Maybe Rwebhu tells you more and more things as she sees you are ready.

And of course as she can get you to stop making things up.

Scenes also come to life that way as well. You start a story expecting certain characters to live to the end, but suddenly you find yourself writing their death!

Which is annoying because I then have to rewrite the entire beginning because she's out of character there.

The other day I accidentally called my cousin by my character's name.

Scenes also come to life that way as well. You start a story expecting certain characters to live to the end, but suddenly you find yourself writing their death!

I am constantly frustrated that my characters never have the courage to show up on paper like they run around in my head.

One of my favorite things about writing is the moment when one of your characters surprises you. You do all this planning, you add all this detail, you create their background and think you know everything there is about them when all of a sudden they do or say something that catches you off guard. They reveal a detail you've never thought of before and it turns out to be better than anything you could've planned.

I am constantly frustrated that my characters never have the courage to show up on paper like they run around in my head.

And all (except few) my characters hair and eye color somehow seem to change after very paragraph. Finalizing physical description is one of the last things I do. =)

Haha, I'm the same, usually I am really not a visual person - I have a horrible visual memory and my dreams are never very vivid - and so I never imagine how my characters look in much depth. Now and then I'll hit on a detail - say, somebody has freckles, or messy blonde hair. But generally I'm horrible at coming up with my characters' appearances. So I try to use characteristic mannerisms and so on to describe them instead...as much as I can!

On the other hand, when I world-build, I just...I don't know. It just happens. Like with the languages I make up - I get a kernel of an idea about how some grammatical structure might work, and then it rolls around in my head for a while and picks up bits of ideas that are scattered around in there, and then eventually I get a sense of the feeling of the language - its personality, its essence. And then actually working out is pretty easy, because I know somehow what should be in it. I know it should have animate/inanimate gender, and it shouldn't have case, and it should put adjectives after nouns, and it shouldn't be ergative. The details, like what exactly constitutes animate/inanimate gender (I always get stuck on body parts, for instance), can sometimes be tricky. But I know what the general structure of the language should look like. Same with my imaginary countries, or historical characters - I get the feeling of what they are or who they are, and then everything just flows.

It's so strange to hear about people like this... because for me, appearance is one of the things that makes a character its most vibrant in my head. Not that it's actually important for their personality... but in my head personality is heavily linked to appearance. (I once based an entire character analysis of a real person off of her hair, actually. ) When I want to make sure I remember a character I've thought of, I always have to give him an appearance. I never forget then.

My theory is that the better an author you are, the more your subconscious takes over creative duties.

I think you're right. Well... or maybe sometimes you have your subconscious telling you stuff all along, but the quality of it improves as you get better. I think it can happen either way.

Honestly, I think it depends on the writer. People can write and think about their writing in incredibly different ways, and so I think some authors will be more self-aware and some authors will be more subconscious...and becoming more aware can be valuable just as becoming more subconscious can be valuable. But maybe this is just me trying to justify my own somewhat analytical detachment from my stories.

Eek, I just realized how "the better an author you are" sounded. I'm not saying people who don't have spontaneous story development probably springing from their subconscious aren't good writers. I meant that those who DO have it happen get more frequent and more advanced spontaneous developments as they mature as an author.

No doubt whether your subconscious ever starts working on your story for you depends on your writing development style and the way you personally process thoughts.

I've been able to "assign" my brain something in my story to figure out or create, and then come back to the subject a few days later and suddenly have a solution. Very useful. It's something I learned with practice.

Wow! That's very cool. I know that with computer problems, I'll often fall asleep and then wake up in the morning with a solution. But otherwise I just think about things consciously.

...How can you remember everything the instructor tells you to remember? Bend your knees. Look down the hill. Keep your weight on the downhill ski. Keep your back straight, but nevertheless lean forward. The admonitions seem endless - how can you think about all that and still ski? The point about skiing, of course, is that you should not be thinking about the separate acts that, together, make up a smooth turn or series of linked turns - instead, you should merely be looking ahead of you down the hill, anticipating bumps and other skiers, enjoying the feel of the cold wind on your cheeks, smiling with pleasure at the fluid grace of your body as you speed down the mountain. In other words, you must learn to forget the separate acts in order to perform all of them, and indeed any of them, well. But in order to forget them as separate acts, you have to learn them first as separate acts...When all the subordinate acts can be done more or less automatically, you have formed the habit of the whole performance. Then you can think about tackling an expert run you have never skied before, or reading a book that once thought was too difficult for you.

Ow. >_<

Mm. Frustrating, that.