When did the characters feel real to you and who is your favourite?

I have treated my characters like pets for quite a long time now. They’re not quite children but I love them very much and of course I feel like I brought them up (which actually, I kind of did…). I think they became real to me after my first draft. In the first draft, I laid out a sequence of events and went through how all the characters meet and in basic form, what they get up to, what they enjoy as people and how they all end up feeling about each other but it wasn’t quite clicking. I even felt pretty uncomfortable writing the first kiss because I felt like they didn’t know each other but it turns out, it was just me who didn’t know them. In the second draft, they started to become real people who had as many demands as I did of their stories… 

I’ve heard plenty of authors talk about how their characters speak to them during the writing process and I didn’t believe it until it happened to me. Somehow, I created characters so vivid that they started back-chatting me. I didn’t want to write a kiss in Chapter 22 but no matter how many times I tried to write around it, they insisted that they would act in no way other than ending up mushed together. I wanted Bonnie to win any competitions (for feminist reasons) but they both agreed that it would be better for Nick to be an equal competitor. 

Nick took a while to feel real to me. He was a bit of a cardboard cut out of a hero until the second draft when I realised his motivations for being in France, for falling in love, why he refuses to be vulnerable and why he has no choice but to show Bonnie everything. I gave him some attributes of people I love on purpose, but only once he was fleshed out enough in his own right. He’s such a golden retriever of a character and I wish I’d had more time to talk about how sweet and cuddly is once he’s let someone in. 

I hugely enjoyed writing Sophie - I think she’s most like me or more likely, the person I would most like to be. I think she’s much funnier than I could ever be though. 

Going into this process, I assumed that I would simply re-create my friends and acquaintances with different names. In fact, when I realised that I wasn’t doing that at all, I tried to assign friends to characters to see if it was possible to write in that way. I absolutely could not do it. That’s not to say that there aren’t attributes of my nearest and dearest. For example - I love skiing with every bone in my body (even the broken ones because of it) but I had to borrow some of the intensity from my skier friends because if I’m hungry on a mountain, there’s truly nothing that can be done - I need to eat. 
At first, I wasn’t a huge fan of Bonnie but she grew as a person during the writing process and now she’s a lot more sympathetic than she originally appeared on the page. That basically means, I took out some of the whining and gave her some more people to love. 
I hope you enjoy reading these characters in my newest (only) ski romance as much as I enjoyed writing them. 
Cecelia x