“I’m Living With Characters Who Never Existed,” Author Admits

Long after my stories are finished, their characters don’t always leave. They linger, evolve, and quietly take up residence in memory, until fiction begins to behave like lived experience rather than something merely invented.

I’ve come to accept that the people who live in my head don’t arrive all at once, and they don’t all behave the same way. Some turn up, say their piece, and politely leave. Others pull up a chair, unpack a suitcase, and slowly begin to occupy real estate I didn’t know was available.

I’m not talking about the early stages of writing. Not the frantic note-taking, the half-formed ideas, or the first drafts where characters are little more than scaffolding. That part is technical. Craft-driven. Manageable. I’m also not talking about the deliberate, conscious act of inhabiting a character while I’m writing—though that, too, is intimate in its own way.

When I write, I wear my characters. That’s the only way I know how to do it properly.

I step into their skin, borrow their posture, their cadence, their irritations and desires. I imagine the way they breathe when they’re angry, the weight of their silence when they don’t answer a question, the way their bodies react before their mouths catch up. Even if the story is written in third person, I experience them in first person. I don’t observe them; I become them.

Then I step back out.

That part, at least, I can turn on and off. I move between characters, then into the role of storyteller, translator, editor. I interpret what I’ve seen, felt, and heard while wearing them, and I put it into language that makes sense on the page. It’s intense, but it’s controlled. Purposeful. Temporary.

What I didn’t anticipate—what no writing manual warns you about—is what happens long after the writing is done.

Years later.

Decades, even.

The strange thing is that the more distance I put between myself and the act of writing, the more real some of these characters become. Not in a delusional sense. I know exactly where they come from. I know they’re fictional. And yet, over time, they stop behaving like inventions and start acting like people I once knew.

They move from first-person inhabitation to third-person memory.

That’s the shift that catches me out.

I’ll be talking to someone I’ve just met, or listening to a throwaway comment in a café, and I’ll feel myself nodding knowingly before my brain has fully checked the source of that recognition.

“I knew a guy who used to say the very same thing.”

Or: “I knew a girl who tried that once and found it couldn’t be done.”

The sentences come out easily. Casually. Socially appropriate.

And then, a half-second later, there’s the internal stutter.

Wait.

No, I didn’t.

Not like that.

The “guy” wasn’t a colleague, or a neighbour, or an old friend from some forgotten chapter of my life. He was someone I invented. Someone who has never existed anywhere except on paper and in my head.

Tony Brindell is one of the worst offenders.

He takes up an unreasonable amount of space in my mind for someone who has never paid rent in the real world. I find myself referencing his observations, his tone, his particular way of seeing things, as though he were once a real acquaintance. Someone I met at a party. Someone I argued with over a drink. Someone who left an impression strong enough to linger.

I have to consciously remind myself that Tony Brindell does not exist. Nothing he has said has ever been spoken aloud. Nothing he has done has left a footprint in this world. And yet he feels oddly solid—fully formed, complete, finished.

Nina DeJong and Maxine Sewell aren’t far behind. They get too much airtime in my head as well. They appear uninvited in moments of reflection, or during unrelated conversations, as if they’re queued up to comment on whatever’s happening around me.

This isn’t confusion. It’s familiarity.

And familiarity, I’ve learned, doesn’t care whether its source is real or fictional. The brain seems perfectly content to treat long-term, richly detailed imaginary figures the same way it treats people who once mattered deeply and are no longer present.

The timeline matters here.

I started writing the first SEETHINGS novel in 2005. That’s twenty years ago. Some of those characters have been with me for the better part of my adult life. They’ve matured, not because I kept writing them, but because I kept thinking about them. Talking about them. Revisiting their choices, their motivations, their moral blind spots.

Some arrived almost immediately, fully formed, minutes after the first words hit the page. Others took their time. They drifted in later, found their footing slowly, and only became “themselves” after multiple drafts or conversations or years of quiet background presence.

And then there are the newcomers.

SEETHINGS III is brand new. Its characters are still fresh. I know who they are, but they haven’t settled in yet. They haven’t crossed that invisible threshold from active creation to passive residency. I’m still in the first phase with them—the writing phase, the inhabitation phase.

They haven’t started whispering unsolicited commentary into unrelated moments of my life. They haven’t earned that privilege yet.

I’m not at risk of accidentally saying something like, “My good friend Sandra wants to try doing that too!” because readheaded Sandra hasn’t had the time to embed herself deeply enough. She hasn’t had the years of repetition, reflection, and retelling required to harden into something memory-like.

That, I think, is the key difference.

Time.

Real people become real to us through accumulation. Through repeated exposure, shared experiences, stories retold and reshaped over the years. Fictional characters can do exactly the same thing if they’re given enough space and enough longevity.

The brain doesn’t tag memories with a neat label that says this one is fictional, treat with caution. It tags them with emotional weight, narrative coherence, and repetition. If a character ticks those boxes often enough, they start to behave like someone you once knew rather than something you once made.

There’s something unsettling about that, if I’m honest. But there’s also something quietly reassuring.

It tells me that the work went deep enough. That these characters weren’t just functional constructs designed to move a plot forward. They were complex enough, human enough, flawed enough to survive outside the book.

I don’t confuse them with real people in any practical sense. I don’t expect to run into them at the shops. I don’t attribute real-world events to them. But they’ve crossed into the same mental category as old acquaintances, people I haven’t seen in years but could still describe in detail if prompted.

That’s a strange kind of success.

It also comes with a responsibility. When characters live that long, they start to feel like they deserve consistency. Integrity. You can’t casually betray who they are without feeling it. You can’t suddenly rewrite their moral compass without consequences—not on the page, and not in your own head.

Perhaps that’s why some characters refuse to be revisited. They’re done. Complete. Disturbingly real.

And perhaps that’s why new characters take time to settle. They haven’t yet earned their place in the subconscious. They’re still guests, not residents.

I don’t know if this is universal among writers, or if it’s a side effect of living with the same fictional universe for decades. I only know that, every so often, I have to stop myself mid-sentence and quietly correct my internal source material.

No, I didn’t know a guy like that.

But I wrote one.

And somehow, after all this time, that seems to have been enough.

–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)