How do fictitious characters come alive?

Joannah Cassady (she’s in the Flower Garden now) seems to have aroused a bit of interest. I’m certainly thrilled about that, and will attempt a kind of explanation.
First of all: Joannah Cassady is a fictitious character. She is one of the main characters in a permanently unfinished novel I’ve been working on & off for longer than I care to admit. It’s a hybrid prose/poetry sort of novel with the provisional working title “Inside Keyhole Stories From the Real Life”. At present it exists only as an unruly bunch of fragments that keep popping up in untimely places & at unlikely times. Enough about that.
The formal aspect: Obviously, the opening line of the poem was inspired by Lord Byron (“She walks in beauty, like the night ...”); but here the similarity ends, apart from the rhythm. Also Poe’s Annabel Lee has been mentioned; well, I do think it’s impossible ever to read Poe (or Byron, or any of the other truly great poets) without being influenced to some degree, consciously or subconsciously.
However, Joannah Cassady is a cat from a whole other kind of bag, with no resemblance to romantic heroines. She is a large, buxom woman who walks with long strides. Not unattractive, but definitely not the smartie-sweetie type. She’s nobody’s fool & she’s pig-headed. She’s been around & seen a bit of the world, but she’s not yet found out what she wants to do with it. (The world, I mean.)
Her name? I simply like the sound of it.

It’s funny, trying to tell you something about her has made me think of the vast populations of fictitious characters that we make up & keep alive somehow, people that exist only in our thoughts & our manuscripts - how do they actually come alive?
I’m not thinking of characters in ‘professional’, published novels & stories, but the people that you & I try to fit into the things we write.
And not only prose; also in poetry we often write about, or to, somebody that we don’t necessarily know in real-life.
Do you shape these people out of yourselves? From a stranger in a dream? An unknown face in a picture, an anonymous voice at the back of the bus?

I think it could be very interesting to see how some of you go about creating your characters.

Magpie Jane

Thank you, Magpie, for enlightening all of us on Joannah Cassady. Very interesting how real you have made her, to yourself and others. Excellent job!

~~flutter~~

When I write, my characters for the most part are derived from people I have known. I sometimes combine the traits of more than one person into my characters, and they may not necessarily be people I have known well, but there are few totally fictitious characters in my writing.

I try to have my characters be people with whom most of us can relate to on one level or another. I use a LOT of conversation and verbal interactions to define my characters as opposed to outright describing them. There are many times that I’ve written pages about a person without ever describing them physically or otherwise. I think it is more important that the reader define them from what they say and do. It helps establish a more personal relationship and gets the reader involved more quickly.

Having said that, my goal and purpose in introducing a character is, first, to be true to whom they are. I seldom bring anyone into a story just for the sake of the storyline, and I would not have them say or do anything that I feel would not be true to their persona. I cannot write very well unless I write from the heart motivated by whatever purpose; being untrue to the characters I write about would, in effect, also be being untrue to me. Does that make sense? There is a little of me in most of my characters, and a lot of me in others.

I mentioned motivation. I cannot write without it, and the learned and well-stated comments and observations I receive from all of you help motivate me greatly. For that, I cannot thank you enough.

Very interesting. I have attempted two short pieces of prose fiction here. A quick scan of them offers mute evidence why I haven't done more. As for characters, well I can't go much into detail about the development of a mouse and a statue.

I shoudn'dt reveal this. All of my characters are real people. The made up characters are my own wishes, dreams, frustrations, kinky ideas, or illegal thoughts.

I have some characters that I have created for novels that are all made up from my imagination. Isn't it great that we can do this? Isn't it great that you can do it?

To answer your question, I would say that the characters come alive when they come alive for you. If they don't come alive for you, they die in the great cyber-hades of literature. Of course, I could be wrong...it is just my opinion.



In reply to juanruiz, I would only comment that he did much better than he may have thought.