character part i: relationships with your imaginary friends

John - sorry if I got your relationship with your chars wrong or off base; go ahead and tell me and I'll fix it. I'm trying to remember back to our conversations =)

Today I will cover characters. Chars, for short. I love chars; they're probably my favourite aspect of writing - or at least the aspect that I spend the most time with. My characters - like the characters of many writers - permanently reside inside my head and frequently talk to me...usually in loud, obnoxious voices, telling me what to write and when. I have several characters who show up more often than others, but invariably the characters from whatever piece I'm working on will take center stage in my head for as long as I'm working on their piece.

The first five minutes after I meet a character or a set of characters are the most valuable; it's during those five minutes that I usually learn the plot overview of whatever short story or novel that I will [apparently] be writing. (Apparently, because I don't really have a choice in the matter - the chars inform me that this is my new story and they won't shut up until I agree). Beyond those five minutes, however, the characters are usually just there to bug me with what if possibilities while waiting for me to sit down in write. I'd say about 80% of the material my characters give me is utterly useless - it doesn't advance the plot, the character relationships, the theme...it's mostly just, "Day in the life" stuff. I love it, but I can't use it, so I don't write it.

I have a friend whose relationship with his characters is different. They, too, live in his head...but they prefer to tell him the story as it happened over the course of time, in chronoligical order (well, almost - they tend to pick and choose parts of the story that they want to speak about, but once they've decided they'll talk about that section in order). They tell him their stories, and he writes them exactly as they say. With me, my characters tell me how the story goes and I stop thinking and just write, so neither of us is in charge...John writes what they tell him to write. If he tries to force it to go his way, they'll stop speaking until he realizes that he wasn't doing it right. Then they'll pick up and talk to him again.

He has to write down essentially everything they say to him, because they don't [seem] to deviate the way mine do. I don't spend the day inside John's head so I can't say for certain, but from what I've heard it doesn't seem like they show him about the time they were all at home after the story had happened, and it was hot, and they had some water guns lying around, and...well, you can guess where that went. Completely unhelpful. Now, this doesn't mean that John will automatically use everything they tell him; sometimes they include useless information that will later get deleted. However, it's information that has to be written down originally because - at least while the char is telling him the story - it's important to that char.

He then, later, goes through and deletes the superfluous scenes. His chars act more like real people than mine do in that respect; come on, how many of you go off on tangents or include the minor details when you're recapping something that happened to you the other day?

Anyway, my point is that characters - to me and to every writer I've ever spoken with - are like physical people who live inside your head. However, they speak in different ways. How do your characters speak to you?