How often do you miss characters?

Great question!

I actually have the opposite problem. I come up with a lot of characters and stories that I never wind up writing down. I tend to never forget the characters... they wind up living on in my head. Sometimes I'll be walking, and suddenly come up with an idea for a character in a story I came up with but never wrote down 10 years ago!

Only once I have written a story do the characters involved leave me alone. In a way, it's a sort of exorcism.

I have about the same problem KBreakstone has. Actually, it's more just a few characters, but my ability is so low that anything I write just isn't good enough.

I may occasionally wonder about my characters, and I sometimes think can I expand on their stories or what happened to them. However, when I actually try to sit down and write something, it, normally, doesn't work and I end up scrapping the idea.

Short story characters can appear in another story, even a novel. They don't have to necessarily vanish when the story is over.

I write two short story series and I'm working on a third one.

there is a mother in a short story I wrote (she ended up dying and was a vengeful ghost... not something I usually write about), and I've wondered if she ever got her revenge.

I don't miss them or not miss them. If I have a character that works for a story, I use that character. If he works for a different story later on, in he goes.

Unless you actually kill a character, he can be used as long as you can find stories best suited to him. And even if you kill him, you can always write a prequel.

But they're characters, and they have no life outside the story, or after the story ends. I generally use a character again because of sales, and editorial requests for more stories using a given character.

Yes, I get very attached to them...it's a little embarrassing really, since I created them! I love the ideas here though to use them in other stories (even a prequel), or in a novel.

I use the same characters for various stories. I hardly ever do a short story that's not connected to something I've written before or will write in the future.

KBreakstone said:

Only once I have written a story do the characters involved leave me alone. In a way, it's a sort of exorcism.

Click to expand...

I have this exact problem. I've still got MCs loitering in my head from years ago dying to get out into some physical medium.

To be honest it never occured to me.
I don't miss my characters but I miss writing for sure.

Nice question.

I have a few that I'm rather fond of and they tend to reappear in other stories, although perhaps in a new guise. I guess I have "types," like I do in real life - a kind of breed I'm drawn to.

I particularly like my bad characters. Bad as in not too nice rather than bad as in badly drawn

I don't miss characters. I can write for them again any time I want to.

A character of mine that I wrote a short story about keeps prodding me. Hey, you were supposed to write a longer story about me. Maybe a novel. Hey! Remember me!

Hard to miss someone who won't leave you alone.

My beta said the other day she'd be happy for me to write about my two characters in my novel for ever, but she thinks if I want the book published, I should probably try to bring the story to an end.

We've been together for three books, so yeah, I'm going to miss them.

With my Oscar Rat stories, I have a virtual menagerie. So many that to keep them organized I store them in a fictional apartment house on a back street of my mind. Oscar has at least a couple-hundred stories using mostly the same characters.

A good character often gets its own series of stories. I find knowing all of them well from previous uses makes it easy to pick and choose characteristics.

Many are fully developed, having their own unique traits. Oscar Rat himself, for example, is married to a skunk named Malodor. She’s a typical housewife type, spending her time trying to keep him out of trouble as well as take care of their daughter, Nancy. Nancy is a teenager with all those teenage angst problems. Nancy has a boyfriend, Andy Aardvark ... and so on.

Oscar works at two jobs. He’s a staff writer, ala Winston Smith, at the Rat Archives, rewriting Rat history. He also works as Rodent Advisor and Troubleshooter to President Obama. That job sends him around the world and gets him into trouble.

Other residents of that apartment house are the same, developed over several stories each.

Other characters, such as my Private Eye, Sam Musscosolvo, are developed over the years and used often in both their own series and along with other recurring characters.

I write an Alice in Wonderland knockoff series, using many of the apartment house characters.

In general, I find that recurring characters are easier to use than dreaming up the attributes of new ones for every story. I already know how they’ll act and react to various problems.

Charlie