# Chilari stories: am I crazy?



## Chilari (Jan 22, 2012)

I was just looking at the "story behind the name challenge" in the challenges subforum, thinking about what I would write if I entered. My user name online being one I made up (or possibly created using a fantasy name generator - I forget which, it was so long ago), and not in fact relating to anything much, I instead started thinking about how I used the name.

Allow me to provide some context for what will follow. I occasionally write fanfiction for my own enjoyment - generally not for sharing. And while some of this is pretty standard, other fanfic involves me, as another persona I use called Faye, who has somehow travelled from the real world into the world of the story I'm fanficing, with the full knowledge I have regarding the plot up til the point in the story at which Faye enters it (and sometimes after that point), which only the reader or viewer could know, not any single character within the story. Follow me so far? I hope so. Basically, the Faye persona goes into stories and fixes them the way I would have wanted them to go.

But I don't just do this with other people's work.

See, the other thing I do is create another persona - this one invariably called Chilari, who is me as writer, entering the world of my stories. And I/she talks to some of the characters - the immortals in one of my worlds. She has different relationships with them, appears at different stages of their lives, though her chronology and theirs aren't always in order, and tells them things and let them guess things about her and helps them through the bad times and is a shoulder to cry on. I've got it such that one of my immortal characters, my favourite, believes "Chilari" is all in his imagination. And another believes she is a goddess. Another just thinks she's a nuisance. And so on (though all know she's not immortal, because the immortals can sense each other when they're nearby, and they can't sense "Chilari"). I do it for fun, and generally set the moments "Chilari" goes to meet the immortals at points in their lives which aren't within the stories about them - they're after them, or at completely different moments in their lives, and only rarely within the context of a story, but I consider it non-canon.

So basically, I was wondering if anyone else does anything like this? I don't really have a satisfactory name for it, though sometimes think of it as self-fanfiction or really just my "Chilari stories". And generally I write it when I'm stuck with a story, to give myself the opportunity to think about different characters and scenarios, and to have a bit of fun writing something rather different. I'm not entirely sure it's healthy, to be quite honest. Just wondered if anyone else did it and what their thoughts were on it.


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## Sheilawisz (Jan 23, 2012)

Hello Chilari, you are not crazy and this practice sounds like a very original idea to interact with your characters and your worlds!! Maybe I should try it, sounds like fun- I write fanfics for recreational purposes too (all of them are freak and crazy little fics) but I have never done what you do with Faye and Chilari =)

I heard about an author that writes his novels in a way that allows his characters to realize that they are actually characters inside a story, and they try to communicate with their writer or something like that!! I do not recall his name right now.


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## Graham Irwin (Jan 23, 2012)

It sounds a lot like Dante!

He was the main character in the Comedia, and talked with Virgil, Ovid, etc. Brilliant, fourth-wall shattering stuff. 

I likey!


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## Konjurer (Jan 23, 2012)

I agree with both Sheilawisz and Graham Irwin- I think you're really on to something here. This is a very cool way of submerging yourself in your creations and I'll bet that you've written some very cool stuff.


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