Am I the only one who doesn't hear voices?

Okay, I've been introduced to the idea where people act like their characters are real people who talk about what they want. "My character told me X" and whatnot.

Am I the only person who gets a little weirded out by this? I mean it's a perfectly fine little exercise, but sometimes it really just makes me want to back slowly out of the room.

I don't hear voices.

Well, not from my characters, at any rate... ;-)

I tend to visualize my stories, like little movies... and while I'll admit that sometimes they wander in unexpected directions, where the scenes I thought I'd reach and the solutions I thought I'd find simply don't work, I've never heard
"the voice" outright tell me what to do. It's more a matter of feeling out the story, figuring out what fits best and what should be saved for another tale.

It took me a long time to develop my ear for character voices. My friend Erika, who is a much better writer than I will ever be, has a really good ear for characters, and I've always been envious of her. But now that I've started to be able to do it myself, no, it's not weird. It's not unlike the way my stories have always developed in my subconscious, gradually adding more details to what "really" happened -- it's just a more character-driven version of that.

I don't hear my characters talking to me so much as I can go into my imagination and play a scene out like a movie and hear the characters speaking within that environment. But no, I also don't understand the whole 'Such-n-such MC of mine told me he didn't want to be be with his love interest, so now I have to make him a new one!' thing. It always struck me as sort of a "only younger writers" do this sort of deal, but I've read about a lot of older writers do it too, and I'm just like... :\ Characters do not have "lives of their own" - YOU made them and you can do whatever you want with them. They don't get to dictate what happens.

I've never had a character actually speak to me. Different people have different processes when it comes to writing; we're all wired in different ways. So while someone else might be able to actually converse with their characters, I only really hear mine when I'm actually writing or when I'm imagining them in various scenarios. Sometimes I feel like they talk to my keyboard instead of me: their voices come out most clearly when I'm sitting down and writing. If that makes ANY sense at all. I have to make a conscious effort to imagine those voices; they don't come out of nowhere. So no, you're not alone.

As for the phrase "my character told me X" - I get that. When I use it, I don't mean that one of my characters popped into my head and said "hey, O Most Powerful Overlord! By the way, X." I just get a sense from my characters. I'm able to think to myself - "no, he wouldn't think that" or "no, that's not like him". But they don't speak to me directly.

To each their own. To be honest, the idea of my characters speaking to me directly freaks me out a little, too. But I'm not about to diss anyone else's creative process.

Paradoxotaur above has said it better than myself. I don't "hear" their voices unless I'm writing or imagining a scene, and even then the characters speak with each other, not me.

May I ask a few question? It's curiosity on my part; something that I've been thinking about.
Questions:
Do you have dreams and remember them, however vaguely and briefly, upon waking?
If so, can you remember people (or even animals or objects) speaking to you in your dream?
Could it be that people who say they hear their characters speak to them (I do, and I'm otherwise perfectly sane), enter into a sort of 'waking' dreamstate, or profound relaxtion?

I don't hear them so much as characters crawl into my thoughts and act out their stories in my head. It's more like i'm this omnipotent being who watches them and occasionally reaches down to eff with their lives for my amusement. But it's not like i sit down and have conversations with my characters... that's way too Romancing the Stone for me.

My characters don't talk to me, nor do I have a muse that motivates me.

I 'just' let my imagination take me where I need to go.

Now that can get pretty interesting at times. I get these vivid visual images of the characters, the terrain, the artifacts and many of the other things that are in the stories. (I sometimes joke that I'm 'channeling' the videos from the future.)

Then there are those times when I'm writing along and find that changing the direction of a scene is much more interesting than what I intended to do. (Shiney...) It keeps me entertained.

When I say, "They told me something," that means one of a few things:

1. I'm been writing for ages on something that sucks, than a random thought comes in and it works so much better for said character

2. I'm dreaming/daydreaming about the scene and I see what they would do

3. I'm tired and I'm just daydreaming dreaming/thinking more about them than usual

4. I wonder about something and the answer pops in waaay too quickly for it to have just, happened.

Kinda odd, but once it happens, you get used to it. Took a long time for me to "hear" my character's voices, but I think it makes things turn out better. I'm writing what works rather than what I think should go there.

Nanowrimo Survey
That link settles it for you. You can see about 700+ participants (self volunteering, granted) that answered that question for you.

You'll see an astounding number of female teenager respondents too. More than the reported 60% that read books... (It looks more like 70-80% are female).

But it has other questions on there too... which helps writers not feel alone and protects from people like last year that dictated how to write and what was right and wrong about how others wrote. You'll see the range Nanowrimo produces.

I don't hear voices. When I was in sixth grade, all my friends, every last one of them, heard voices of their characters, except me. I was a little envious of them. All right, more than a little envious. It seemed like something that just happens, like the characters actually are real people, and frankly, if I'm working under that mindset, I do create better characters. But my characters do not just suddenly come and talk to me. I've heard that you need an overactive imagination in order for that to happen, which made me doubt my creativity.

Recently, I started "interviewing" a character I had because I couldn't figure out his darkest secret. I just sort of imagined him behind me, and started asking him questions. He didn't talk to me.

I literally had to force my mind to reply, in his voice, the way he talks (that took some getting used to. Characters are not my strong point.). I listened to him, like it was him talking, but if I didn't focus really hard, he wouldn't talk to me at all. I tried that with another character, and she came much more subconsciously than he did; I learned pretty much all about her family from that one interview, and most of it she just sort of said. Although since I was making it happen, I did have to go back and fix what she said.

Now I do that with some of my characters, and it really does help me get a hang of who they are. But it's always me doing it. I wish my characters spoke to me the way some peoples' do.

I never did learn that character's darkest secret.

FWIW, I find it very odd. At no point is what I write anything other than a conscious decision on my part to substitute one set of words or subplot for another. The characters, well-drawn or not, are nothing more than the sum of those decisions.

I see it as a very subconscious way of sitting here thinking "If my character was here, in this situation, what would they say/do/think?" And instead of being like "Oh, Bobby would say this", the dialogue is just there.

And when one of my characters insists they wouldn't do something, it's more just that I'm thinking about their character personalities, and coming to the realization that they wouldn't react the way I originally wanted them to, not if I want to keep them in character.

Also, when I write, I tend to think in terms of scenes, or bits of dialogue. So that's how things get structured in my head, which I think lends itself towards "hearing" characters.

Real is an interesting word in this context. Yes, a character is real, because you as a writer have created it, but no, they are not a real physical human, sentient being.

I interact with my characters, but less than I did as a child. If I sit and zone out with the intent on listening or acknowledging my characters, I can tell you that Lietta, my MC, is pacing aggravatedly right outside my work, pissed off that she's been told she has to go save Tapyna, who is sitting on the other side of the glass watching Lietta with a very sad expression on her face. They very rarely speak to me, they interact with each other instead. In a way, it's like I'm transposing them into this world, seeing how they react to things. A couple years ago in my last year of school I had a character (who was drawn not written about) who would always be there in history (maybe cause I zoned out in history a lot), smoking and sulking angrily in the corner. I don't literally see them with my eyes, they're in my head.

I don't usually say "This character said BLAH to me", I'll say something more along the lines of "This character is doing BLAH". Typically it's "they aren't working with me! WHY WON'T YOU LET ME WRITE YOU" and such. Or characters not leaving you alone/not showing up. A good example would be the night before NaNo as I was drifting into sleep Lietta stepped to the forefront of my mind, opened her arms and showed me a scene of her life, which I took and worked into the start of my novel.

-waves flag- I'll be over here in the freak camp now. (:

I'm, with all due humility, pretty decent at creating interesting characters. But, I have an analytical mind (I'm differentiating this from "mathematical"; I'm horrible at mathematics, I mean I'm analytical in the sense that I'm good at abstract thinking and philosophy, which needs to follow a rigorous logic if it's going to be any good).

To give you an example of how my mind works when creating characters, I'll give you the process of formation for the main character of my current play. The character is known as "Bennie".

Concept: A man who is incredible at picking up girls and who decides for selfish reasons to teach a nerd how to pick up girls (note: this is also my plot synopsis, although that's not really relevant).

Formulation: Stick him in a certain situation: In this case, a bar. How do I imagine him to look (early thirties, slightly darker-skinned Italian) What are his motivations? (Nerdy high-schooler, never had the nerve to talk to girl he had a crush on, making up for it now) Acts? (Like a cool Grease-style hipster. Uses ridiculous pickup lines that, bizarrely, work).

So, now that I know the basis of how my character "ticks", it's a simple matter from there.

I don't "talk" to my characters. Never did. I find the concept to be interesting but I'd feel weird attempting it. My mind just doesn't work that way.

I just find it asy to "slip into" my characters. I have no idea why. I guess it just comes from knowing their motivations. Once I have those in mind, all I have to do is think like they would in a given situation and write it down accordingly.

It's like..."Okay, Bennie's old High School crush just came into the bar. What should he do? Now, I would avoid her, but Bennie wouldn't. He'd go right up to her and show off how cool he's become, and then ask her out." And this is exactly what ended up in the script.

And..."How would Bennie talk? He find Amber attractive. Would he tell her this by saying, 'I just want to say that I think you look beautiful today?' I would, but Bennie wouldn't. He'd say, 'By the way, you look just as gorgeous as you did in High School'."

I don't remember if that line actually ended up in the script, but that's besides the point.

Direct answer: No, I don't hear my characters or talk to them, but I honestly can say that I don't think this affects my writing. I think of it as almost a psycholgical profile; once I know what my character's motivations are, it's a simple matter of figuring out how he /she would react in a given situation. Then I write it down.

Yeah, it makes me distantly uncomfortable. I hear dialogue in my character's voices in my head all the time, but I understand that it's me thinking it up. Talbot didn't tell me anything; I just did an impressive job of dreaming up something that Talbot totally would have said.

There's an important, hair-fine difference here.

My characters talk to me, voices and all, I could have a whole conversation with them if I had the time. I deffinatly talk about them like they are my close friends, and it creeps out my family but that's okay, and at least my hubby is finally getting used to it. My character for this book really likes to keep secrets from me and I'm not likeing it at all.... I have no controle over my stories really, I just feel like some one is sitting next to me telling me what is happening and I am writing it down word for word. I think Editing is when I really take over in the writing process rather then my characters.

My characters talk to me, and I talk back to them. Aloud. Complete with gestures and facial expressions. Occasionally I forget and do this at a bus stop. :-)

Am I crazy? Probably. But I think it's a requirement for being an artist. Actors probably do the same thing, get so into their part that they start acting it out with invisible other characters. It's a drawback/side effect of being very imaginative.

My characters don't talk to me. It's more like my brain writing them into weird things therefore it's more like "My characters suddenly decided to take a trip to a random stone sculpture because it's obviously about magic and everyone loves magic and Gavin is a mage. He might be interested. Oh-oh-oh."
I can imagine them talking to each other though - but I guess that's not special at all! (That's also the reason why I decided to write this thing in English this year instead of my native language - my characters talk English in my head! Not German!)