I was curious to hear about everyone's best character(s) they have created. Best can mean most fascinating, funniest, or even most powerful. Judge it however you like, I suppose. I just wanted to hear your thoughts. I have two candidates for best character, I think. One of them is a philosopher of sorts who uses crimes as thought experiments. He ends up in jail, and uses his time to counsel a young inmate. The other is a young comedian who creates his own TV show. He has a bunch of unresolved issues with his father, and that's a lot of where the conflict comes from. Have at it, everyone.
Well not necessarily the character I like the most but the most vibrant, most fun, and most popular with readers would be my professional fashion blogger who also happens to be a devout Jain. She's constantly whipping back and forth between the fact that her belief system is based on radical non-violence and self-denial, while she personally is obsessed with the trappings of American pop culture and can be very hot-tempered (she also has a serious case of adult ADHD and has a love-hate relationship with her medication, which she may or may not take depending on how she's feeling about herself). I love writing her because she's crazy sarcastic, fully aware of her own internal contradictions, and very capable at manipulating the people around her (while having very little control over herself).
One of my books, the main character, Kyle, he winds up finding his father had died. He is an interesting character. He gets quite a temper on him. I'm not too far into it. Been doing it off and on for about two months. I just have a hard time with writing. I don't think I am very good.
One of my best characters, and one who got a really great response from the other students at a writing course I took a few years ago, is middle-aged guy name Hiram Zoder (I love that name!). He's in an alternate-history kind of old West, in which there's a scary new religious order growing from town to town, and they want to kill him because they think he carries a curse (he fathered two deformed children). He's on the run. He has one advantage: he's an apothecary, and skilled in chemistry when basically nobody else for hundreds of miles knows anything about it. He styles himself as a magician of sorts, earning his living by dazzling people with colored smokes and flames and some kinds of drugs, earning enough money to move on to the next town just ahead of the religious order, but he feels guilty about cheating people. He knows his smokes don't work; they're just their for show, but he's scared to death of the religious order that's after him and does what he must to survive. In the meantime, he grieves heavily for his children, who had been taken by the religious order for a "purification ritual" that involved burning them to death. I find him a fascinating guy, full of rich possibilities. I wrote him originally in a short story called "A Merchant of Smoke," but I'm expanding the story into at least a novella. I love this guy.
Li Yuan, a Chinese university student abducted and pressed into service as a coolie laborer. Recognized for his intelligence, he is asked to manage part of his plantation's sugar operations. He saves up enough to buy his freedom at the end of his indenture contract, outmaneuvering the plantation owner's efforts to keep him in servitude. Once free, he eventually works his way to Oriente where he finds a job on a plantation managing its sugar refining operation. He marries Mercedes, a young slave girl whom he has taught to read. When the Ten Year War breaks out, he joins the rebel army and rises to the rank of colonel, serving as an aide Gen. Antonio Maceo, while Mercedes joins the mambisas.
Though I love the characters in my first book, the female heroine I created for my second is by far the most interesting. Brianna was raised by her drunken single mother until she runs off at age 16 with her then-boyfriend. They predictably split up some time later and she finds herself struggling through numerous minimum wage jobs until working as a topless dancer. She does not follow the usual protocol of becoming an addict, however. What she does struggle with is sexual compulsiveness, and this pairs her up with a number of not-very-nice men, one who almost kills her in a rage. She winds up teaching herself about weapons and has a natural talent for shooting, which she becomes passionate about. She does a nice job of killing the abusive boyfriend (justifiably) and later finds herself in another predicament (book two) rescuing a Ukrainian girl from white slavery. In the process of creating all these tales my girl becomes emotionally stronger, more self-aware and in my next book will begin to come to terms with her demons with therapy...all while working in a very murky business of 'corporate security' with a man she finds incredibly annoying but ultimately her main love interest. The things I like about Brianna are she is tough, smart, fearless but so filled with mental issues that giving her little hurdles to jump has been wonderfully easy. As she moves through the trilogy she is able to come to terms with many of her issues and better herself while still being foul-mouthed and feisty.
Usually I think my greatest character is whatever I'm currently working on - But I have high hopes of pulling off my complicated characters in my rehashed story. Right now they're a bit cliché and flimsy but they have good bones to develop them into something greater.
Not sure about the greatest, but I had the best time writing Reggie in my and @T.Trian's sci-fi WIP. He's got this air of a rough-necked soldier (which he is, too), but he often ends up in embarrassing situations, like this one time elevator doors violently slam shut just when he's about to step through, so his foot and boot get stuck between the doors. The only way he finally wriggles out of it is by pulling his foot out of the boot. Then he has to go back to his ship to get a new pair, but the only spare boots that fit are on a corpse (it's not like such high-end, protective boots are in abundance), so he has to pull them out, put them on, and then dash back in action. He could've carried on with just one shoe on, sure, but what with radiation and dodgy artificial gravity, it's safer to stay fully covered and have magnetic boots in both feet. I don't know, I just really like this guy. He doesn't mind that his nickname, Blacktongue, comes from his excessive medicinal coal chewing; he's like "I've got IBS, what of it?" and that he's belly is a bit doughy 'cause he didn't get the best of genes. Although I hated him when he broke up with his bf to protect him, but even that felt like just the kind of thing he'd too.
Mine is my most fun to write for. She's a side character who is, deeply troubled and a complete manipulative bitch. Her mother died in child birth and her father died years later in a war. As a result she cares about little in life. She intentionally pushes people away to prevent herself getting hurt. She blames the MC in the story for the death of her father and try's to make her life hell. I think what I like the most is being able to write such a mean and calculating character. She's everything I hate in a person, and I would hate her if she were real.
That is really Amazing theme and Absolutely brilliant name for the story. Would love to read it when/if its finished .
I really enjoy writing for Coco, a secondary character in my urban fantasy detective novel. She's a half-pixie changeling, lesbian art photographer who dresses like a flapper, is only 5' tall, and calls everyone by pet names like "darling", "honey" and "sugarbuns.". Her favorite swear is "Tinkerbelle's t*ts!"
Either a female test pilot who is also a (non-supernatural) vampire, or a Regency Era Thief Taker from the upper classes and who only accepts sex from very special women as a fee and has a deadly schizophrenic cross-dressing female partner.
