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We spend a lot of time with our characters, so it only makes sense that real-life discussions remind us of them.  Personally, I find myself referring to fictional events and imaginary people whenever it’s relevant about as often as I bring up real people.  Hey, they’re real to us, right?

Terrell is a character from my novel Finding Mulligan.

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We can’t win.  If we write what we know, people roll their eyes and tell us we’re inserting Mary Sues.  If we write about characters that aren’t at all like us, people suggest we’re acting out our fantasies through our characters.  Yes, our experiences and perspectives affect our characters.  But most of us are not incapable of realistically portraying characters who think and believe differently.

I have kind of written one story about an asexual person, but I’m not sure if she’s aromantic. She seemed pretty adamant about not dating until she was about eighteen, and then her relationship with a boy she lived with became not really romantic but definitely partnership-ish, and she gets jealous when he spends too much time with other people, but I think we all do that. 🙂

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Some writers might be able to give you a straightforward answer to this question.  But I’ve never met one that really could.  For most of us, it’s as varied and unpredictable as dreaming . . . there are elements of real life, elements of fantasy, mix-ins from things we thought were neat, ideas that have been interacting with each other since who knows when.  I have no idea where my ideas come from.  They seem to sort of create themselves.

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Sometimes non-writing-type-people actually think we get to decide what happens in our stories.  Hilarious, eh?