Forums » Smalltalk » Anyone else get annoyed with their own characters?

As a writer, I have plenty of bad habits and one of them is getting really wrapped up in my characters to the point where I neglect plot. I can't help it, though, because characters are so important to me as a reader!

But because I spend so much time exploring characters, I become intimately aware of their flaws and personalities. Which brings me to my biggest problem: I get annoyed with my characters. And when I'm annoyed, I dread writing them because I get embarrassed by what annoys me about them.

It's a huge problem, since the only way for these characters to grow (and become less annoying to me) is to write their stories! Specifically, I've got a protagonist who I find just so obnoxious. And she's not terrible, by any stretch, she just starts out with a lot of protagonist traits that annoy me. As the story progresses, she grows in a way that makes her one of my favorite characters. But I can't get her out of the "awkard teen" phase (for lack of a better phrase) because I don't like writing her pre-development.

Does anyone else get annoyed or frustrated with their own characters? And does it make you less willing to share their stories?

I've had plenty of characters basically go off and do their own thing, usually the opposite of what I want or need them to do. It makes it really difficult to continue the story when they won't follow the plot you have set up for them. Sometimes you get something good out of it, like say learning something new about your character's sexuality that neither you nor they were aware of, but a lot of times it just leaves me frustrated and with no clue how to continue with what I'm writing.

I have a lot of characters that I'm embarrassed of but in those cases it tends to be because they're super old and either made from a half-formed idea of they never got the development they deserved. Which is a bit of a different issue than you're talking about here.

Yeah, that's frustrating, too. It's nice when you can still salvage the story after they charge off to do their own thing, though. Or at least salvage the character and use them elsewhere.

Aw, but the old ones are the most fun to revisit later! Sometimes the ideas they came from are great, and even if the character doesn't work anymore, the idea is fun to play with.

I get frustrated with my characters when they don't bend to fit an RP thread. This recently happened when I dropped one of my characters, Laedo, into a game. I kept trying to bend him to interact more and understand other characters in the game, but because he's built to be an obtusely stubborn and sort of condescending guy, and because he was the only one of his species in a game filled mostly with humans, he just wasn't budging. It wound up making the RP almost fun, but if I bent too much I was giving up making him IC just so that he'd be more fun to play against. A little of that is okay, but a lot makes me feel awkward about carrying on. I wound up dropping the game because I couldn't find just the right balance.

Mostly characters annoy me when they don't perform. Either the way they're built makes them respond to a situation in a way that is 'fun' (whether that be by reacting strongly, or unexpectedly, or whatever), or the player (me or someone else) isn't giving them the attention they need to be engaged in the moment. Gosh, that's frustrating!