Living the Fictional Dream

My goodness — November has been such a busy month. It is lucky I didn’t attempt NaNo, because I surely would have failed. What with the last of busy season at work, I’ve been doing well the past few weeks to take care of the baby and myself and get all that work done. Things are finally slowing down a bit, though, and I’m definitely looking forward to the long weekend.

Some people on FaceBook have been putting what they are thankful for in their status updates all month. There are so many things that I’m thankful for — the health of my little girl who was born so early and is now doing great, supportive family and friends, an understanding job, my sister’s wedding that’s coming up… I could go on and on.

But, in addition to all that real life stuff, I’m also thankful for my characters. Characters are the most important things in a story (in my opinion, anyway). A story can have a great plot, but if I don’t identify with or at least like/respect/enjoy spending time with some of the characters, I won’t enjoy either reading or writing a story.

Here are some of my favorite characters from my own stories and why I’m thankful for them:

• Caryn — She is the main character in my Y/A fantasy novel-in-progress. As far as characters go, she is the one who takes the most from me. Writing Caryn taught me that you can’t be too nice to your characters — if you don’t force your characters to go through hardships, you’ll have a very boring story.
• Sean — He is the male lead in the same novel discussed above. He was the first really flawed character I created, and I’ve learned lots about writing trying to balance his flaws with the hero he is destined to be.
• Sarah — She is the main character in my short story, “The Widow and the Stranger.” She is the first character whose first person voice came to me fully formed, which helped me better utilize that point of view (most of my stories are in third person). She also helped me realize that a plot does not have to be grand or action-packed to make a good story.
• Luke — He is a werewolf and the hero of my urban fantasy universe, the pack leader who doesn’t want to be in a pack. He featured in my story “Alpha,” and he’s the main character in another story set in that ‘verse that is making the rounds.
• Super Sonic — My very first superhero, the main character in “Zero to Clean in 10 Minutes or Less.” That little piece of flash started a whole universe, and I’m glad he finally got his happy ending.
• Daniel — He is the male lead in a Y/A novel that I wrote for NaNo a few years ago (I stalled on the revisions, so it is also still classified as “in progress”). Daniel is deaf, and trying to write him was a good way for me to stretch my writing chops by writing about someone who is not like me. I researched into deaf culture and tried to make him as real as possible.
• Viola — She is the antagonist in my short story, “The Sorcerer’s Wife.” When I wrote that story, Viola was the villain, but as I wrote, her character came to life and leapt off the page. She is the embodiment of something one of my graduate school professors said: “Everyone is the hero of his/her own life story.” Once I thought about the story from Viola’s perspective, it was a whole new ballgame.

So, those characters are some of the writing-related things that I’m thankful for this year.

What about you guys? Have you ever written a character who changed you as a writer or whom you could not live without? What writing-related things are you thankful for this year?