Young Writers Society

I've had three specific characters in my head for a very long time. They're Baird, Innusha, and Misha. I can't say how long these three have been with me. And I can't say how long I've been trying to craft a world that they fit in.

Before Noevery, it was Wanderlust. At least, that was the big one.

As I'm writing now, I feel 100% more confident on where their story is going and how I'm going to write it, but there's still that fear. I don't know..

Misha's name has already changed, and now Baird wants to be a girl. It's almost too much. I've had these characters with me for a very long time and now, dammit Innya is morphing into a villan!

It is exciting, but also scary in a way that I can't explain... I'm afraid I'm going to overwhelm myself and end up quitting... I don't know.

Change is hard. Necessary, but hard.

I've had similar experiences with my own novels before. The protagonists of my current novel, with the exception of Akane, all were the main characters in my first one. They've had their fair share of name, personality and story changes. Even though it's difficult at first, it's like what you said - change can really great for a story! I wouldn't have been able to explore some more complex plots if I hadn't decided to write the characters into my current novel instead of their old one.

Honestly, after so long in various worlds and realizing I have A Type (even if you go through my old storybook profiles, characters end up with the same basic parts), I've grown to accept my ancient, been-with-me-forever characters are archetypes instead of characters.

Each individual character is unique enough that I can say "this character is close to [name]", but in the end everyone has varying mixes of trust issues, abandonment, bullying, and self destruction.

I've found it's a lot more freeing because the characters still exist, still breathe, still have the potential to be how I'd originally imagined them, but their traits are just traits I go back to time and again because they're what I need to explore. It also helps me realize when I've made characters too similar to each other, so I can break apart my archetypes and adjust the mixes of who everyone is so they do end up unique.

The original characters still exist. Their archetypes are just being applied somewhere else with different variables, and that's okay.