Creating My Own Comfort Characters

Now that I’m back to writing, I’ve been reunited with what I affectionately call my Book Boyfriends, or the male love interests of my stories. And I have to say, I missed them. Which is crazy, because I know they aren’t real people, but when you imagine conversations with these fictional characters, and spend hours plotting their backstories and trying to make them feel as real as possible, they start to become a person in your head. Being reunited with my Book Boyfriends has got me thinking about comfort characters, and how it feels to create them for yourself. 

As a person with chronic illnesses and a keyboard, I quickly created characters that brought me comfort while I wrote about my experiences with my illnesses and the support I wish I had from a partner. In fact, I often say that writing “Love Through Agony”, my novel about my endometriosis, helped me cope and survive my diagnosis, and a big part of that comes down to Tobias, the male lead. It’s impossible not to deeply connect with a character that is hearing all of your thoughts and knowing just the perfect thing to say in response to it. 

Having the ability to write my own characters and make them perfect for me is something that I love being able to do, since I know that no matter what I do with a project, I can always go back and read their stories, and almost hangout with them. I spend so much time working on projects that it’s nice to be able to go back and enjoy the characters I’ve created, and it makes all of my hours of labour feel more worth it, since I get something out of it, too. 

Something else I love about writing my own comfort characters is that I can write whatever I want with them. And I don’t even need to use it in my novels, either. If there’s a scene or a conversation I want to write with that character, I can do it, and nobody needs to see it. Granted, most of those scenes end up in the novels because making my female characters suffer is one of the other joys of writing, but I have the option of keeping those sweet moments to myself. 

Even if I ever stop publishing my writing, I’m certain that I will keep writing my Book Boyfriends, because truthfully, I don’t think I could walk away from them if I tried. And that’s how I know I’ve written good comfort characters.

That's all for now, folks!

-C