Making Up Characters

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It is something I use to do at school I use to make characters up I don't know if it is an AS thing but this is before I knew had it there was Eddie Idiot 'Idiot by name Idiot by nature' Bib and Bob shop.

There were others as well. I still do it now not in front of people but in my head it can be fun especially when I am on my own.

Yeah I do this. They are often caricatures of real people who are driving me crazy. I use a funny voice in my head, pretending to be them. I even have a secret stash of caricatured pictures of some of my coworkers.

I do this most of the time. Up until I was 22 or so years old, I‘d take characters I liked from fiction, or, say, from movies (sometimes I start obsessing over them almost as if they were real people, and can‘t let go), and use them as a basis for creating characters of my own in my head. These could be either completely fictional individuals, or people I supposedly knew in real life. In the latter case they could turn into imaginary friends as time went by, and I‘d picture scenarios involving them which mostly centered around various everyday situations. I‘d usually imagine myself to take part in these scenarios as well; then I would assume a certain role, identifying with a character whom I particularly liked and/or who was my role model at the time. After I turned 22, the daydreaming seemed to become less intense, maybe because I started to write seriously and my imagination came to be channelled into my stories. But then, on the other hand, I still daydream a lot, only now it‘s about the characters from my writing and the situations they might get into.

As a child, and until I turned 14 or so, I took my characters from cartoons, and my daydreams resembled anime. The one I remember most clearly was about „dinosaur people“ – people living on another planet who wore suits of armor with guns hidden inside, which could appear when necessary and then be transformed back into ordinary-looking armor when the battle was over. There were different types of armor, each corresponding to the protective armor (like horns, bone shields and so on) of a specific species of dinosaur. I had several favorite characters among the „dinosaur people“. Sheila, who had a Triceratops suit, was short and bulky, and wore a heavy armor plate over her chest and shoulders with three hidden machine guns. She also had shoulder-length hair that curled outwards at the edges, resembling the shape of the bone plate that protected a triceratops‘ head. Jeremiah, who had Pterodactyl gear, was tall and graceful; he was dressed lightly and had a stiff long cape which was strapped to his arms, and could be tranformed into a hang-glider with small two turbo engines attached to it. He had straight, waist-long hair that looked a little like the elongated boney formation some pterodactyls had on the back of their heads. Etc. I think the whole idea was inspired by „Denver: the last dinosaur“, which I really loved, as well as some other cartoons about dinosaurs. But, weird as it was, I didn‘t like to admit that my characters were based on dinosaurs; if someone asked me about it, I‘d have probably denied it very fervently.

Then, when I reached my mid-teens, my daydreams became more like ordinary movies and became a lot more mundane in nature. They came to revolve around realistic situations that might happen to people in an everyday context. I felt a need to continue with them because I wanted to „work with“ a certain emotion, or a kind of relationship between people (to understand how it works, what it is like, or to accustom myself to the fact that it is there). With hindsight, I think it was a type of therapy and a way to adjust to real life (a weird one, but still), more than anything else. Sometimes I also developed the daydreams simply for the sake of fun. I could randomly open a dictionary, come up with a pun or an expression I thought amusing, and then spend some time imagining my characters talking and using it. Or I could come up with a funny situation, and dwell on that for a while. I‘d end up laughing quietly to myself and being thoroughly entertained.

My imaginary friends/characters stayed with me for long stretches of time. When I was 16-18, I imagined being in a band of rock musicians who were also my enemy-friends – Andrius, the lead guitarist (based on Pink Floyd‘s Dave Gilmour), another person, whose name I forgot, who was the piano/keyboard player (based on Pink Floyd‘s Richard Wright), and some others. I was the singer/songwriter, and played a part corresponding to that of Pink Floyd‘s Syd Barrett. Later, when I was 19-22, I had another group of imaginary friends: Audrius (based on Anne Rice‘s Mael), a neo-Druid priest and an awkward, irritable but kind man; Iana or Nakhti (based on Anne Rice‘s Maharet), a quiet, phlegmatic, but forceful visually impaired woman; Anastasia or Menma‘atre (based on Anne Rice‘s Mekare), her twin sister, very forceful, outspoken and prone to bouts of rage; and Breanna (based on Anne Rice‘s Armand), a stealthy, dishonest, confused leech of a person. I imagined we were living in the same space and interacting on a daily basis. In these interactions, I‘d frequently play the part of a Khayman-like character. All of them were almost real to me (though of course I knew they weren‘t), and sometimes I even talked about them to my flesh-and-blood friends as if they were real people I knew. (I'm somewhat reluctant to admit that I had this many imaginary friends for this long. Even here, it took some time before I could pick up the courage to talk about it openly. Usually, I'll say I had only one imaginary friend up until the age of 18 or so - the one who meant most for me, and who took part in the most intense and significant scenes).

There‘s one thing that makes me wonder, though. While the characters in my daydreams could be very life-like, they never diverged much from the original characters I based them on. One could always tell where this or that character came from. I also tended to get „stuck“ on the same things – same types of situation, same character clashes, same traits I found interesting, same emotional content etc. – and I‘d run through them again and again, so the overall plot didn‘t move forward too much. What I usually did was imagine random snippets of action that tended to repeat many times over; they were very vivid, like watching a video and being in it at the same time, but they didn‘t normally form any coherent storyline. Often, I‘d get lost in some specific scene, thinking about all the minute details, and would eventually let them bog me down (not that it bothered me much, though). I didn‘t really have the ultra-complex, brilliant fantasy life that some people describe, which allows them to easily think up a plot for a potential fantasy novel in a matter of weeks or even days, or come up with vast panoramas of alien lands. By the time I reached my teens, my characters could be psychologically complex, rounded, well-thought out. They had complicated (and often twisted) relationships with each other and could experience subtle shades of emotion. But I never sent them on adventures; the events that happened to them often couldn‘t be arranged in a coherent logical sequence, and were limited to a number of separate scenes laden with emotion. Their prototypes were also readily obvious.

I still have this problem even now. I managed to come up with truly original characters of my own only recently (about two years ago), and all of them are almost too autobiographical. When writing, I‘m good at describing and have an eye for detail, and I also have no difficulties coming up with separate scenes that have some significance for me (emotional or otherwise). But I have a lot of trouble planning out entire plotlines. Too often, I‘m simply mot sure what might happen next. I may well start working on a scene from the middle of the story when I still haven‘t decided how it‘s going to end or to begin (when normally it should be the other way round). This is partly why I prefer stream-of-consciousness pieces that have practically no plot and focus on the character‘s psychology instead; this is also why I write with a co-author – she helps me out when I can‘t put the separate pieces of my writing together, while I sometimes give her advice about how to describe things better.

I was wondering whether this is what has been called „lack of imagination“ in people with ASDs. I‘ve never really thought my imagination was poor – if anything, it has felt like I have too much of it, and have spent most of my life in my head. But I wonder if these qualities my imagination seems to have – the stereotypicality, the repetitiveness, the focus on detail, the fragmentariness and inability to follow through with coherent plotlines, - are something that is shared by AS/AU people and may have given grounds for autism reserachers to believe that autistics are lacking in imagination.

I've always loved making up characters/fictional worlds.

When I was around 8 or 9, I had a long-running story that ran through my head. It was about all of my favorite singers at the time, and they all lived in a house in Calfornia together. The characters were based on real people but I had them living in this fantasy world where they were all friends.

Then, in my late teens, I had two friends who were as quirky as I was, and we actually created a whole list of characters whose home base was a nightclub in NYC. Some of them were based on real people, others were totally fictional. We used to write out dialogues and everything, and we thought that we were the funniest people on Earth. I still laugh when I think of the stories we wrote but I would be mortified if anyone else had seen them.

I currently have a Harry Potter obsession which comes and goes...I really enjoy reading some of the HP fanfic and I even make up my own sometimes, in my head. I'm not real thrilled with the fact that most of my favorite characters from that series are now dead.

I made up characters (and still do) from countries I have an interest in. I have made up characters from England, Greece, Spain and the Ukraine. They are all cat lovers, too. There is at least one cat in all of my stories, most likely a tabby or a Siamese.

when i use to drive in the car and look at the surounding scenery pass me by i use to think ninjas were besides me cutting up the land..*shiver me timbers* it was very cool! also there use to be a cartoon called rescue rangers, duck tales&darkwing duck. rescue rangers was my favorite but i loved duck tales becasue in one episode the entire world turned to gold

Duck Tales Rescue Ranger Duckwing Duck I remember all of them very well.

I like making up characters as well. I don't know how many I have now. ^^; My deviant Art site has a lot of them up on it.

I've always loved Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers. And the one where Baloo flies Air planes.

Actually I thought the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers was the best one I might actually start a thread up about favourite childrens programmes we used to watch on Random Topic watch out for it one day.

I have difficulty creating my own characters. I usually just play around with characters from videogames and anime I like, but if I do create an original character it's usually just a warped version of an existing character.

In junior high/middle school I invented a character named Kenny Valentine, who was a gay transvestite with red hair. He began as being sweet and innocent, but I wound up turning him into a very disgusting, perverse character. He was loosely based off of Kenshin Himura from Rurouni Kenshin. Earlier this year I created a character named Abelia, a happily subservient housewife who was always pregnant. She was a vampire, and married to Dracula. She was visually based off of Abel Nightroad from the Trinity Blood anime, but had a much more serious and feminine demeanor. Then there's my current character, Dame, who is a caricature of myself. I'm planning on writing a story about her, but I doubt I'll get it done.

Actually most of my characters were comedy scketch characters which you would see on a comedy scketch show.