Creation...Ain't It Grand?

So, the inner workings of a writer's mind tend to be a little different. Say someone throws out the word "crow". A normal person will visualize a crow...small black bird with annoying voice...and let it go at that.
A writer on the other hand, will fix a cup of tea or coffee and sit down to visualize his or her crow. That crow will be flying and will probably be talking as well. It will tell this person that has given it life all about everything that has happened since the egg cracked.
As it is talking, the writer will glance down. This is not from boredom with the crow because heavens knows, its story is fascinating. The looks are from curiosity. We want to know what strange lands would give us a talking crow.

L. Frank Baum looked down from his crow and found the Land of Oz. J.R.R. Tolkien gazed down from his crow and saw Middle Earth. J.K. Rowling looked down from hers and found Hogwarts Academy.
So what do these people have in common besides an aversion to using names that can be substituted with initials only? The answer is simple...a God complex.

Every writer has one. We might deny it, but it's there. Those of us fortunate enough to write fantasy get to really flex ours. We get to create entire worlds! The lands, the seas, the people...we get to name them and make them look like whatever our imagination says they must be and best of all, we get to decide their future. And why not? We created their past, we're dictating their present, so why not grab the rest of the enchilada and plot their future too.

I've gone so far as to create two worlds. I have a bad complex. But there it is, two worlds that I decide what happens in. I decide who lives, who dies, who finds love, who loses it and if I feel like it, who gets a bad case of chapped ass. It's all me.

I have characters that are as real to me as the people next door. As real as the people I work with, play with and the people I love. Why are they so real? Because almost every character I create has some part of someone I know in them. I've collected a lifetime of stories and often reach into them to explain why a character has a certain reaction or why a character feels the way they do. I use past experience to make feelings come to life, both happy and heartbreaking.

Since the character we create are very real to us, a big craze now is character interviews. The questions are directed to the people we create and they answer them. If we're lucky, they give a nod to the authors that created them, but most often they simply ignore us. They just act as if they've always existed, as if their worlds have always existed.
This is such a fun thing, I'll get some that have already been done and post them here. I'll also try to get some new interviews here as well.