Your favourite character to write - and why?

[Jo Zebedee]

does anyone have one? I find to write a book about a character I have to love them a little bit so it's hard to choose - they all have bits that make them a favourite.

My obvious choice would be my mc of the Abendau trilogy but, whilst he's certainly the character I know best and find easiest to sink into, I'm not sure he's my favourite. I actually like his bonkers, sexy space pilot (hey, you all knew there had to be one, right ) father a lot but possibly of all the characters I've written the irreverant second male protagonist in Abendau might be my favourite (because he's funny and smooth and doesn't always have to do the right thing). Apart from my policeman in Inish... Or Amy with the fairies in her head... Or.....

Anyone more decisive? And why?

 

[Bowler1]

General Isha-Redd, a dog/kangaroo alien who does terrible things. He seems to have no morals and will do anything for power, but in reality he is the one good Monco sticking to his principles. He always wrote himself and his dialogue. Emotions and everything else flowed through my fingers, across my keypad on danced onto my computer screen. He keeps pulling me back and time and again I edit this WIP back up to my current writing standard, and guess what, I'm back on it. Like a junkie chasing that first rush, I'm in the grip of Isha-Redd.

 

[chrispenycate]

Understand, I need to be unfaithful; I must be in love with my POV character, or worst case, the being with whom my POV is in love. So I can be unrelentingly devoted to a dragon, or my starmaid, or… until I open a different document and up pops a different love of my life.

It has to be like that, protagonist, antagonist, just agonist - if I were a reliable lover I could only write one story, and only one view of that. As it is, even a seventy-five word challenge is a one night stand.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

So true, Chrispy.

Me, I must be a flirt...

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Several. The last one was my villain from the Godlost Land. He was just so perfectly evil and lacking personal insight that he kept making me laugh as I wrote.

And my MC from Dragon was enormous fun too, but that may i part have been because I knew from the start that he was going to die, so everything I wrote for him was bittersweet.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[jastius]

i likes the crazy silly ones most.

(chrispy! oh mys! you'rea travelling man )

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

I always fall I love with my villain. And my hero too. I'm fickle like that

 

[HareBrain]

I think I like writing any character who's in the grip of strong and possibly dangerous emotions or convictions.

And I think that's why my consistently favourite one to write is Tashi, a young warrior who's lived all his life in a remote monastery before being pushed into a modern world he doesn't understand. He's a mass of tensions -- religious certainties fighting crushing doubts; a highly emotional nature he tries to suppress; physical bravery and terror; a basic kindliness fighting against the sternness of the remote, forbidding God he follows and who he wants to love him. One reason he's very easy to write is that he has a set of rules and an outlook by which he knows he should try to live, and his life is lived in comparison to that ideal all the time. It's a simple framework that allows for quite a lot of complexity.

 

[Locrian]

My favorite character to write is from my serial, First Contact. Edward Pele, Confederate Auditor. He is actually the main villain, but he's just such a horrible person that he is so much fun to write. The idea I had when creating the character was for his moral compass to have him do the wrong thing but for the right reasons. He has a reputation for being a fearsome hunter of Separatists and he has a mythology surrounding his past that only he knows the truth behind. He's underhanded, manipulative, cold and cruel, but also very intelligent and absolutely committed to what he believes to be the right thing to do.

 

[Rafellin]

The ancient vampire from my novel 'A Place in the Dark' - Rafellin.

He started off as an RPG character of mine, and shares too many fundamentally antisocial outlooks with me, even after moving on into NPC-dom and thence into backstory mover and finally to book character. He scares me, because I sympathise with him way to much, and some of those opinions are not socially correct, let alone politically.

But I love him to bits, the thirteen-century-old tour-de-force that he is. So much so that he's already got another novel, and it's science fantasy mit dem vampiren - set a thousand years from now.

 

[Chel]

I have two.
Lucas Greyfort, first and foremost, from Whom the Gods Love. He's described by my MC as "the shadow behind the spider's web" and sooo delicious in his sinister plotting ways. Lucas was always a joy to write. Every scene he was in practically wrote themselves. I wish the MC Valmarian had been as easy to work with!

The other one is Mark, a guitarist side-character in a romance I wrote. He was a much nicer guy than Lucas, but was just as easy to write, especially after I noticed he tended to only talk in full sentences when he was saying something important. As with Lucas, any scene Mark was in was just me channeling words onto the page.


Does anyone have a female character they love to write? Apart from Chris, maybe?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I have a few female characters I enjoy writing. I have a fairly snippy one who tends to come out with the funniest lines and makes me giggle, and I have a female teenager in on of my YA who
I found ridiculously easy to write and liked lots.

 

[Mouse]

Female character: Sasha from Shuttered. Ok, so she's a springer spaniel, but she was fun to write and (so far) everybody loves her. Had some excellent comments from my editors about how much they liked her character.

Male character: Liam from Otherworld. Spoilt, selfish, melodramatic, funny, murdering posh boy who comes good in the end. (Have had a couple of excellent comments from my editor about him too, which was a massive relief as I know he's going to be one of those characters who some people just hate).

 

[Toby Frost]

For me, the most enjoyable characters to write are outright lunatics: people like Major Wainscott of the Deepspace Operations Group, the Ringleader (robot gangster and dandy) or Captain Felicity Fitzroy (former head girl and lacrosse captain, now dreadnought commander), because any conversation with them is going to be a sort of comedy sketch. But you have to be careful not to allow the wacky characters to take too much space up. They have to remain novelties to a certain extent.

I also like writing about people who, whilst not angsty, nobody-understands-me types, are slightly not right for the societies they inhabit, like Polly Carveth, with her lack of interest in danger and (self-imagined) weight issues, or Suruk the Slayer, who doesn’t quite understand humans, even the ones he likes. At the moment, I’m doing a serious story in which two lead characters are a woman painter and an old man. They’re both interesting points of view, especially the painter, who has to resolve all her problems through cunning and skill rather than violence.

The hardest characters are the ones who don’t have much to them, or have to be written exactly in a certain way. Some of the villains in the Smith stories have been parodies of certain types, and so their reactions have to be just right. Also difficult are characters who “spoil the fun”. Smith’s girlfriend Rhianna is like that. It’s difficult not to let her seem like an over-protective mum, telling the other characters not to go and have adventures.

 

[Juliana]

I always love my MC...

That's the hardest bit about getting into a new project: letting go of my old MC and getting into my new one. Sometimes it takes a few chapters.

I just wrote a teen half-demon who was delicious to work with; just the right measure of teen angst, bitchiness and all-out ruthlessness.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

Like Juliana it's the MC I am currently writing. Whether that is Angus, Socrates, Ian, Cece, Gus and Iris, Davey or Pich (my new one). They are all so different and fun to write.

Angus is so well pathetic really but he has this great sense of honour.
Socrates is fun because he is so damn unpredictable and I never know what he is going to do next. One minute he is hugging his brother or having fun playing sports and the next he's chopping a man's head off or crying in a ball.
Ian I find a bit dour, his humour is purely for show, for other people. He is one miserable sod to write.... I'm hoping less so in the next book as he has acquired some of his old confidence back.
Cece is a blast. There is nothing really heavy about her personality. She is a good time society girl with a heart of gold.
Gus is staid, but a decent bloke and perhaps the closest to my own personality. Iris is a bit Mrs Brown - a big softy but only after she's battered her target.
Davey is a right sod but as it is a sit-com is more fun than anything to write.
Pich - we are just getting to know each other but I think she stands a good chance of being a firm favourite by the end of November.

 

[Phyrebrat]

It's funny reading how different your favourites are. It makes me feel a little inferior because although I aim for deep characters I don't particularly enjoy writing my MCs. Not that I don't enjoy them but for me they're part of the process.

Instead, I get excited writing my monsters. There's always a backstory to their actions and origin that never makes it into the story.

So:
Bobsie - Ill-Born's furiously angry red implike creature resembling a traffic cone. He's bitter and loathes nature, existing to destroy animals and one MC.
Tall Man - an 18' tall blue man also from Ill-Born who harvests corneas and kidney stones when another MC <ahem> needs them. He decorates a tree with the bodies of his reaping activities.
Grey Addy - a mean ghost with complexes
The Mermaids - small elemental creatures that exist wherever there is water and tragic history.
The Scarlet Battalion - a huge army of the dead who rip across the Salisbury Plains in Corn Dolly

(I won't expand on Gash )

pH

 

[Toby Frost]

I wouldn't feel inferior. They sound like some excellent monsters, especially Bobsie.

 

[AGraceMartin]

I love writing witty and dry characters. The kind that can be slightly arrogant, but it's not annoying because the character is so wise.

 

[Tyburn]

For me it has to be Marcus Burkenhare, the protagonist's best friend and ship's doctor. A tall fellow with the looks of Clark Gable and the physique of Johnny Weissmuller, a self-medicating high-functioning alcoholic and possible psychopath who (as it will later turn out) has absolutely no qualms about killing a defenceless man, or even using torture (on one occasion on himself in order to prove a point).