by Rolly-chan » Mon Feb 11, 2013 10:29 am
Yay, accepted ^^
@fanfiction discussion (why are people always discussing things that interest me when I can't post? XD)
I have a slightly different view than the rest of you who have replied. I haven't ever felt restricted when I wrote about main characters. And I've written many fanfictions about main characters over the years. I don't think having many facts known about characters takes away the creativity. Rather on the contrary - it's always a pleasure to see how creatively people deal with it. To my mind, picking a character with a blank past doesn't mean you are automatically more creative than with a character whose past is mostly filled out. Creativity, to me, isn't how much you invent yourself, but rather how unexpectedly or interestingly you write about those characters while still staying true to their core. With that definition, it doesn't matter how much is or isn't known about a character. What matters is how you portray him.
I mean, you can still be very uncreative even when you invent everything yourself. Some people only use clichés or create paper-people (one-dimensional, flat characters), which shows that you can sprout uncreative stuff even when you've got a completely blank project in front of you.
Yeah, that's my two cents ^^
(And then, on a kind of related note: You always have to obey your own rules when writing. Once you create a character, you have to stay true to his personality, and you also have to keep in mind how your world works and keep it working the same way throughout the story, or people will throw the book / or stuff against the wall in frustration and never look at the things you write again. So you are never completely free with what you're writing. Well, you are, but if you do that, your readers will start to hate you xD Inconsistency is not good.)