#(the aristoi have a sort of consciously evolved and utilized alters/multiple systems)

[mumblingsage]

FWIW, this is a significant part of my writing process too, though the "tulpas" (or maybe I should just call them "my imaginary friends") aren't always limited to being from works in progress. And in my case, they can stick around for a long time after I finish or abandon their stories. I kind of enjoy having them around; they help me work on the writing, but also sometimes I just chat with them about my day (meaning my inner monologue comes in the form of an inner dialogue). At no point do I lose track of the intellectual fact that they aren't real, and I'm not particularly concerned about my grip on reality*--even as they certainly feel real, enough that it's occasionally disorienting to recall that they aren't and I'm actually in this room alone.

One reason I might not experience a sharp transition when I finish writing a story is because this has been a very longstanding habit-of-thought for me, going back to middle school. I believe I started it because a writing book I read included the suggestion to talk to my characters more (Worlds of Wonder by David Gerrold. I'm not sure how vivid the character-interviewing experience is for Gerrold, but maybe I should reread his book for hints).

Notably, I only experience this with original characters, which is one reason I find fanfiction trickier to write than original fiction. However, I can write original stories about characters even if those characters never talk to me. The rare times I write novel-length work, an imaginary friend often emerges, if only because of how much time we spend together; but the imaginary friend can pop up very early in the drafting process, and isn't always the character who gets the most coverage in the novel (and it isn't always a POV character either). On the vanishingly rare occasions I attempt sequels, the characters do return for a visit.

I suspect this is moderately common among writers if just a random sample of "Who is on Tumblr this Tuesday afternoon" produces at minimum of a pair of us.

*For family history reasons I don't care to get into, I'll just say I am more concerned about delusional or psychotic symptoms than the average person. So I will personally never do certain recreational mind-altering drugs. But the character-tulpa-friends don't worry me.

When you finish writing a big story and you became very close the characters, was there a time after where you were like "i kind of want to revisit these characters again, but i should probably just let the story be, they deserve to rest" Im not talking about wanting to write a sequel, is more about still coming up with fun ideas for them, maybe a little scene or something, but choosing not to do anything with it because it'd feel disrespectful to the ending you gave them?

This doesn't happen to me, no.

The reason is that, once I finish the story, my sense of "being close to the characters" suddenly vanishes. And, although there are rare moments where it (briefly) returns, it mostly stays gone.

I can't remember if I've ever talked about this in detail before, but – when I'm in the process of writing a story, especially near the end, the characters feel "real" to me in a very strong and kind of uncanny way.

I don't actually believe that they exist as independent entities from me (much less sentient ones), but it does almost feel like that's true, when I'm in the thick of the writing process.

I have no trouble intellectually distinguishing fiction from reality, even in the state I'm describing. But my emotional and intuitive relationship with my characters, when I'm in that state, is pretty similar to the one I have with real people I know in real life. And there are a bunch of... uh, mental phenomena?... associated with this that I'm slightly afraid to describe because I worry they'll sound like hallucinations or delusions if I don't add a lot of caveats.

For example, when I'm alone in a room writing (especially if I'm writing in the middle of the night), I sometimes feel like it's not just me in the room, that the character I'm writing about is "there with me," in much the same way I'd be aware of someone real person's presence if I knew they were in the room but didn't happen to be looking in their direction. Or: sometimes I feel like the characters' voices are "flowing through me," that I'm merely taking dictation from them – and will sometimes even think to myself: "man, I'm so grateful that the character is helping me write this part, because if I tried to do it all by myself there's no way I would get it right." And it takes a moment before I realize, wait, no, I am writing it by myself – at least in a literal and physical sense.

Basically if you read this post, and then sort of read between the lines of it under the assumption that I'm downplaying how weird the experience actually is because I'm worried an accurate account would make me sound kind of unhinged... then you will have roughly the right impression of what the writing experience is like for me.

Whatever is going on here, it feels like it's probably on some kind of spectrum that also contains stuff like tulpas, multiple systems, and maybe also the way that children can sometimes get really deeply wrapped up in their imaginary play. I don't know how common this stuff is among writers (maybe it is common but rarely talked about?). It's not something I've experienced anywhere else in life; I don't experience it with other people's fictional characters or stories, or with fantasies I have that aren't associated with a work in progress, and I don't remember ever experiencing it before I started writing fiction as an adult.

Anyway, as I said at the top, the moment I finish writing a story, this phenomenon simply turns off, suddenly and completely. The transition is very noticeable when it happens, and makes me feel something akin to grief or loneliness over the brief span between the moment it starts and the moment it is fully completed – like I've just lost a bunch of close friends at once.

With Almost Nowhere, I remember a very specific feeling – on the evening of the day when I finished writing – that the characters were "departing 'into' the finished book," reverting to a lesser existence as "mere words" rather than "real people," as though they had been plastic toys animated by Terra Ignota's Bridger, and were now turning back into toys again. It made me sad, for a little while, but once they'd fully "lost their reality" I no longer cared, because it was that same sense of reality that made me care, and now it was gone.

So, to finish answering your question: I don't feel an urge to return to my old characters, because it feels intuitively obvious that doing this is impossible. That anything else I wrote about them would be inauthentic, somehow, in a way that the original work wasn't. They were "there," before, but they're "gone," now. This difference is very stark, and very hard to ignore.

(As I noted above, they do sometimes "come back" to me – very rarely, and very briefly, but that is enough for a proof of concept. Perhaps, if I were to try, I could find some way to "bring them back" for longer intervals. But I doubt I will ever try that. I feel a bit afraid of the concept for several reasons – for one thing, the "inauthenticity" I just mentioned squicks me out and I'd prefer not to come too close to it, and I also have a baseline wariness of doing stuff that seems too much like messing around with my own mental health. There's also a "catch-22" involved here, where I don't feel motivated about the characters the way I used to, and that means I'm not even motivated to do things that would generate that motivation. The "target" of the effort won't appeal strongly to me until I've already gone to the trouble of obtaining it, which means the effort doesn't feel justified in the first place.)