omg. GET IT?

11. Who is your favorite char­ac­ter to write? Least favorite?

It was inevitable that this question should arise eventually, so I was pretty prepared for it. Being asked who your favorite character is is like the previous entry I wrote about being asked which novel is your favorite – after a while you start thinking of your original characters as “children”, and being asked to pick a favorite feels like parental heresy. But since this question is more about asking which is my favorite to WRITE (or not write) it doesn’t feel so bad, because there are pretty simple reasons for this.

All but one of my favorite characters to write is female. (Why is this not a surprise?) And to just get him out of the way right now, my favorite male character to write is good ol’ Zachoran. I can’t say no to writing about an academic in power with tons of money and a perchance for general debauchery. He’s also my male outlet for fun times with romance. (I’ve gotta have at least one.)

For the sake of simplicity, I will for now only mention one favorite female character to write, who just happens to be in my other series. Before her “creation”, I could’ve easily picked another character, but the fact of the matter is that Yumiko is one of my most fascinating characters to write – if only because I almost never know what she’s going to do. Like how she just SHOWED UP one day in a scene and was suddenly a main character. Thee problem with her though is that she tends to do very immoral things, which, at times, can upset me. So in this instance, I suppose she’s also my least favorite.

All right, I lied. There’s actually one last character I want to talk about, and, quite possibly, she IS my favorite character to write at all. My only regret is that she does not show up in her series until about three books in, so all of my real experience in writing her comes from side projects. But Charletta just kinda fascinates me: she’s from a completely different culture, with different values, and just isn’t bothered by much of anything. It’s kinda become a game of mine to see if I can piss her off somehow. Clearly I need to write her more.

There are other characters in the past that pissed me off to write, but after so many years I’ve grown accustomed to most of them and have learned their traits and morals to the point that conducting any scene with any character more or less goes smoothly – character development rarely holds me up. In fact, if anything blocks me, it’s sentence structures, but that’s a totally different topic for another day. Oye.