Unless you're a writer, you may not understand this. But my characters act like spoiled children sometimes. I swear. Nag, nag, nag. They're in my dreams, in the shower with me, follow me to the Food Lion, and stand behind me every minute of the day.
A couple of them are satisfied with they way they've been written. But a few of them, drive me nuts. They want to be sweeter, or nastier, or scarier, or prettier. They want me to up the ante. One in particular screams a lot. "Raise the stakes!" They whisper in my ear horrible statements like, "kill him off," or "get rid of that gal, she's not important." And Lord, sometimes they ask me to "kill my babies." (Actually, that's a writer's term for sometimes giving up things you've written that you love, in order to make the story better.) From time-to-time, they get me out of bed in the middle of the night! Can you believe that!
They remind me of their goals, their dreams. They sometimes even change their names, absolutely refusing to be called what I've been calling them for months or years even. Pisses me off. They stand over my shoulder, watching me type, and say "um, excuse me ... excuse me, Pam ... but that's not what happened." They argue with one another and sometimes I just have to kick them out of the room for a while.
Occasionally, though, a sweet timid charachter, one that never makes demands, calls me "Sugah" and "Sweetie," she'll just sit and tell me things about her childhood. One guy, a loathsome character flirts with me, he's disgustingly brazen. A particular woman character I hear from, usually not until after the midnight hours, offers to show me secrets about herself she's never told anyone. I usually cave, and we'll sit until morning, rewriting the whole first three chapters, just the way she demands it to be written. I'm a sucker for those characters.
They float in and out of my daily life. Show up at the oddest moments. In the car, on a plane, on the tredmill. But really, I ain't complaining. Necessarily. Because if they ever stopped visiting me, I'd miss them. Some of them, and you can believe this or not, have been around since I was a little girl. My imagination houses them all. And now they're very happy I'm finally putting them on the page, making them come alive. In somebody's heart and mind, besides my own.
Blessings to you and yours.
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