My Other Children: The Characters Who Live in My Heart

My eldest daughter likes to joke that the characters in my books are my “other children”, and honestly . . . she’s not wrong.

When you create a character, you learn them the way you learn a person you love. You figure out what drives them, what they want, what they fear, and what they’ll do (or refuse to do) to get it. You end up knowing things about them your readers never will, and sometimes readers imagine things you didn’t intend at all. That’s part of the fun. Well‑developed characters feel like real people: layered, complicated, and full of contradictions.

You spend so much time with them that their choices can surprise you. They tug you down paths you didn’t plan, revealing pieces of themselves you didn’t expect.

And then comes the terrifying part: sharing these “other children” with real people.

Once your characters leave your hands, people will judge them. They’ll misunderstand them. They’ll love them, dislike them, or dismiss them. They may even mispronounce their names. As an author, it can feel a little like bracing yourself for someone to look at your baby and declare him or her ugly.

It’s vulnerable. It’s exhilarating. It’s the strange, beautiful cost of creating people who only ever lived in your mind. That is . . . until you were brave enough to let them out onto the page.