There's a phenomenon that tends to happen as a writer working in any form of media. If you create a character with enough of a personality and a clear enough drive, or simply a character who you have spent a lot of time in control of, you will find their actions coming to you in a different way than normal. Where as before, the character probably existed to fill a role or move the story forward or provide exposition, the character is an entity in it's own right. You stop writing what you want the character to do, and start writing what the character would do.
This phenomenon has been explored in the Nostalgia Critic, but I want to share something I noticed with characters of my own.
I was adapting the ugly duckling to my fictional world, except it followed a RomCom style where the "duckling" fancies a boy, a girl comes along who convinces her she won't get the guy by being so meek, the guy is overheard complimenting the original appearance of the duckling, the evil girl gets her comeuppance.
Except I needed an exposition sponge for the boy to interact with, or his side of the story would remain entirely in his head and the story wouldn't even exist without a heap of useless padding.
In comes Tristan, a goofball who goes to extreme lengths to entertain his friend or generally prove a point. He took a challenge that the boy would be famous by simply knowing his name, and even appeared on the news to achieve this. Through the story, he's even learning how to play guitar singing an awful song about the boy's name.
Then I fleshed him out at the climax, where I needed a suitable comeuppance and he seemed the character to deliver. I made his learning the guitar a very complex way of telling off a girl who turned horrid at his old school, and he just became one of my favorite characters introduced during a joke.
Flash forward to when I thought about what a fanfiction in this fictional setting would be like. I realized he would not accept the reality of a mary sue plot, and would actively revolt against it. This is when I learned he was writing himself.
Flash forward further to another fictional tale I wrote just recently. I wanted a fixer who would set up a perfect moment through thoroughly planned out manipulation and MANY prior arrangements. It just seemed wrong to have a new character when the clear character to use was Tristan. And through this story, he struggled against the plot designs, but it all worked to something he and only he would do.
But then I noticed something else. In one of my first stories, I put the main couple of Alan and Jasmine as the primary pair. They were a shakey couple at best, but had enough tender moments to put them together. I knew very early on that they broke up shortly after the story.
Their friends, Alice and Boon, were only really there to fuel conversation and commentate on the events going on around them. There was no hint in my mind of them being a couple, but looking back, I can't deny it for a moment. They chose to spend time together, decided to commentate a race together while Alan and Jasmine were being snuggly, and had a friendship that lasted beyond the relationship of their best friends.
Not only do my characters decide what they do in story, but they make relationships entirely of their own accord. Maybe it's because I'm a shipper, but if this means my characters have more complexity than the author can comprehend, then more shippers should be original storytellers.
