Getting use to a different character

**SubZero61992** · January 25th, 2005, 05:59 PM

I hope I am not the only person who has begun writing different stories about someone else but as I write I keep calling the new character my old character's name.

I was just wondering if I was the only one having a hard time to deal with this change.

**JamesL** · January 25th, 2005, 06:23 PM

For a long time, I planned to write a book concerning a character called Rill. Don't ask me why, but that was the name I was going to use. Anyhow, Rill went through many incarnations - namely a shephard, blacksmith's apprentice, son of a healer, a young soldier, a squire, etc...

Eventually I stopped using the name; the focus of my book changed and I decided to use a different name.

Having used that name for so long, for the next 6 months everytime I went to write the main character's name 1/4 of the time I would write Rill. It got to be quite annoying actually!

**SubZero61992** · January 25th, 2005, 06:39 PM

Aye, I wrote a chapter and when I reread it I had used Genjo the whole time, I had to go back and change it.

**TheEarCollector** · January 25th, 2005, 08:43 PM

I personally have not had this problem because all of my characters are different people. They act differently, they react differently, they are completely different people, and when I get in their heads I have to realize this...
Don't get so hung up on developing one character that it intrudes on the creation of others - that tends to happen moreso when you first start writing and all of your characters are really just extensions of the same person.

**Jay232** · January 25th, 2005, 08:51 PM

The first story I ever wrote involved a girl named Angel. I had written the story by hand in my tiny handwriting, a 256 pg story that I still haven't finished. When I dug it up during a time that my creativity was stumped, I decided that I was going to rewrite each page on the computer so I could make sentences better and use bigger or better words. Well I also decided to rewrite it in third person instead of first and to change the name of the girl. I found myself typing Angel almost every line

I don't think it's so much that some of us are spending too much time developing one character, I think it's just that we spend so much time writing this characters life and getting to know this character as if he/she were a real person that are minds and fingers get used to typing that name.
I just take the easy way out and each time I save my work I go to 'Find' in the edit menu and look for the name I might have accidentally used instead of the one I was supposed to use

*J*