What would your favorite Author(s) think of you if you showed up as one of their characters?

[hopewrites]

My first thought was to put this in the General Book discussion section, since the idea came as a spin-off from @BAYLOR 's thread What Would Your Favorite Fictional Character(s) Think Of You as Person?

Then my thought was, no, it should be in the workshop as I'm asking people to imagine how someone else would write them, and that sounds more like a writing exercise than a reading question.

Then my thought was, no, I'm not actually asking people to write themselves from the imagination of someone else, it's just a complex what-if situation. And all the complex what-if questions relating to characters I have seen are in General Writing.

If however the mods believe I've wandered in my thinking (and having laid my thought trail out no one can blame them) and this belongs somewhere other than General Writing, I hope they will feel free to move it.

Preamble over;
Being reminded of a line from Stranger than Fiction "Why was Harold talking to this man? This man is an idiot." I began to wonder how their authors would feel about my clandestine chats with their characters as proposed in the above named thread.

As we have had a few threads discussing how we feel when our characters do this or that, or what we would say to them over coffee/pints/what-have-you I thought it would be fun to see if I could flip the table and try to imagine how the conversation would go if I were the Character and someone else the Author. How would my mental processes, character flaws/strengths, vex/thrill... this-or-that author should they be saddled with me for the length of a work?

If I were to be caught in a tete-a-tete with Jane Bennet by Jane Austen how would the latter Jane's reaction to me as a character be expressed? How would C.S.Lewis react to find that Aslan and I have chatted over steamed creamer more than once? Would Anne (or her son Tod) McCaffrey object to my applying for an apprenticeship at Harper Hall? What sort of world would Terry Brooks set me in?

Which authors would cast me in a post-human scenario and what changes would they make to my current form, forcing me to grow as a character over the length of the piece? Who would refuse to see me as human at all, and what form would I take for them? Among the more 'blood thirsty' of my favorites, for how many chapters would I live before an apropos death on my part forced some other character to feel and express emotions they had hitherto not well understood?


As I'm still contemplating my answers I'll wait a bit before posting them up.

Feel free to post up your own Q&As as they occur to you.

 

[Mad Alice]

I think I would be hesitant to costume up as a character unless I was assured the author really liked the character.

I mean we all write these characters in our own works. The ones you have sort of stuck in there and don't really enjoy, but suffer through their antics because its necessary to the story.

What if you unknowingly chose one of those and pranced up to your favorite author?

 

[hopewrites]

I was thinking more of a Stranger than Fiction sort of deal, where the author I like ends up with me as a character. My hair, my eyes, my shoes...

There is always the problem of being one of those characters the author writes off, so to speak. I've had more than one character whom I've dismissed for being inhumanly insipid, a few of whom have taken their entire body of work with them when they left.

On thoughtful review; I think Jane Austen might have enjoyed my follies and varying opinions of humanity. We would agree on dismissing the tragic parts of my story with only as much clarity as necessary, and focusing on the morally edifying and pleasanter bits. On the other end Terry Brooks would do wonders to pull angles on my suffering I'd not thought to see till after the fact, and no doubt would use my vivid imagination to otherworldly ends. I cant see not loving the story I ended up in by ether of these authors.

Still thinking over the rest, so I'll have to post up again at some point.

 

[Mad Alice]

I too think you would make a lovely Elf Princess in one of Terry Brooks books, Hopewrites. Or perhaps a Dragon Lady of Pern, the first Master Harper Dragon Lady.
Though my childhood dreams of Anne McCaffery's books were more for being the Rowen then for Dragonriding. But I think it would be difficult to dress up as a psionic.

 

[hopewrites]

Well that's the fun of it Alice, you pop up in her head and she thinks 'mm psionic?' and who are you to say no eh? I'm quite sure Terry would catch all my shape-changing-madness and start sketching me out as some type of pseudo-humanistic-demon that helps/hinders along the Word and the Void path. Or drop me in Landover where I sensibly belong.

Were I to wander through My Beloved's bookshelf and end up in one of his authors... I would trust William Gibson to find use for all my dystopian, post-humanistic tendencies. Though I fear Asimov would have no use for me beyond a chapter or two, though being called on for even that long to be a plot-mover in his sweeping epics would be honor enough.

I'm reasonably confident that the McCaffreys would send me to Harper Hall, there really is no other place on Pern for me. Happy to sing and play my days a way I wouldnt even mind if all the more mention I got was Dancing with a MC or two at a Gather and a duet now and then. Perhaps if assigned out of Hall as a faithful correspondent with the Dear MasterHarper I could provide useful information and foil a plot or two, but it's far more likely I'd be found to be as oblivious to Pern politics as I am to Earths, and therefor more likely to be smiled at in advance of my disappointment that some play or concert is under-attended due to world-changing events.

The thing that strikes me in all my musings is that I've yet to put my self forward as an MC. Which has me wondering if I'm neglecting to view myself as the MC of my story IRL... One really ought not be incidental in one's own life.