Poll Results!

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REMINDER: If you asked any questions in the comments on Thursday, you'll find your answers in Friday's Mysteries Revealed post, and if you asked questions on Friday or during the weekend, you'll find your answers in yesterday's Further Secrets Revealed post. Enjoy!

And, I'll keep this post short, since the last two were epic.

Thank you again to everyone who took the time to vote in my First Friday October Poll! The poll is closed and the results are in and my Excel spreadsheet and pie chart are complete.

I was right in my original guess that most of us -- 74% -- are writing about characters who are the same age as ourselves or younger, but I like seeing that for each slice of the pie, things aren't too skewed in favor of any one age range! (Nice to know we aren't all competing for the exact same audiences, too.) Still, I may have to take this as a personal challenge to branch out myself... maybe for book #3...

So let's move on from age and talk about other character differences and similarities. Writers, please post in the comments one way in which your main character(s) are different from you, and one way in which they are the same. No comparison is too big or too small! The main character of my novel drinks coffee -- I don't -- and she loves unagi (eel) sushi -- I do, too.

First Friday... Poll!

Okay, I was starting to get sloppy about how I handled my fiction contests, so for the First Friday of October, I'm going to do a poll instead. Writers, HOW OLD ARE YOUR CHARACTERS?

The survey is over there => in the right-hand column, and you can answer more than once if you have multiple books or multiple main characters of differing ages in one book. Answer as you feel best represents you and your work.

(And yes, I know it should be "older/younger than I [am]" but I've abandoned technically correct grammar in favor of the colloquial phrase that simply sounds better.)

I first starting thinking about this question back when I wrote my Class of 2013 post. I suspect that most of us write about main characters who are the same age as ourselves or younger, simply because it's easier to put ourselves inside the heads of people who are at a life stage that we've actually experienced. It's the same reason that many writers write about characters who are the same gender/sex as themselves -- it's always harder, and therefore riskier, to portray a point of view that you've never actually had.

Obviously there are exceptions. I love Nick Hornby's How to Be Good ( first-person p.o.v., female) and Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box (third-person limited, male character about 20 years older than the author). And I didn't pick my main character's age because I thought it was easy, I picked it because I felt it was suited to the moment in her life that I wanted to capture, and because it was suited to the events she experiences in the book... but I did choose the story in part because of my own ideas about the importance of learning about oneself at a certain age (mid-to-late 20s)... and I have those ideas because I myself have already gone through my 20s.

Writers, tell me more about your own work! Who do you write about? Why did you choose characters who are old/young/in-between? Was it easy or hard? Do you think your audience will be the same as as those characters?

And for everyone, do you like to READ about people your own age? Younger? Older? Do you like characters who mirror some part of yourself, or characters who have nothing in common with you whatsoever? Or does it just not matter?