Authors have to be all the characters. And sometimes those characters can reach out and surprise you by saying and doing things you'd never planned when you first created them, or in the case of fanfic, planned for the story based on whatever original source you're using.
Sometimes a fan can influence an author to change their mind about what they'd planned. This is obviously a tricky thing for professional authors because of the danger of plagiarism (the reason why, in the TrekLit forum at TrekBBS, we are absolutely forbidden to mention fanfic or even story ideas or requests in that subforum - that's where the pro authors hang out and they can't risk being sued because they'd never be able to prove an idea was theirs first).
But when it's a fanfic fan and author who get into a correspondence, sometimes nice things happen. I've been following a Harry Potter story for well over a year now (Chapter 125 was posted a few days ago), and I've gotten into some interesting discussions about the story, the themes in the story, how they relate to RL, how different cultures treat the same topics (she's in England, though she is somewhat familiar with Canada), and we've covered topics from serious to silly, in her writing and mine.
In her story, Hermione marries Arthur Weasley (Molly was killed in the Battle of Hogwarts), and by this point, they have a baby. For a few weeks the author was teasing us about names, asking suggestions, musing back and forth about what to use as she hadn't quite decided if the baby would be a boy, girl, or twins.
And just when we thought the names were finalized... it turns out that she named the baby after my dad. In one of our conversations I'd mentioned some geese we had. They were payment-in-kind for some repair work my dad had done on someone's vehicle (this was in the '60s and he had an automotive repair business on our acreage). Instead of eating them, we kept them... an adult gander, two adult geese, and a male gosling. The gander's name was the same as my dad's middle name, so I was telling the fanfic author about these geese, how we'd tease my dad for sharing a name with a goose, how they were better than any watch dog, and how they'd imprinted on my parents (they went for a walk down the country lane one night and didn't realize that all of the geese were following them, walking behind, in single file; the neighbor lady said it was one of the funniest things they'd ever seen; I missed seeing this because I was in BC with my grandparents).
Well, this story evidently made an impression, as the name shared by my dad and the gander is what she named Hermione and Arthur's baby. When I told her later that I was surprised by the name, she said outright that she'd named the baby because of the story I'd told her.
Sometimes a fan can influence an author to change their mind about what they'd planned. This is obviously a tricky thing for professional authors because of the danger of plagiarism (the reason why, in the TrekLit forum at TrekBBS, we are absolutely forbidden to mention fanfic or even story ideas or requests in that subforum - that's where the pro authors hang out and they can't risk being sued because they'd never be able to prove an idea was theirs first).
But when it's a fanfic fan and author who get into a correspondence, sometimes nice things happen. I've been following a Harry Potter story for well over a year now (Chapter 125 was posted a few days ago), and I've gotten into some interesting discussions about the story, the themes in the story, how they relate to RL, how different cultures treat the same topics (she's in England, though she is somewhat familiar with Canada), and we've covered topics from serious to silly, in her writing and mine.
In her story, Hermione marries Arthur Weasley (Molly was killed in the Battle of Hogwarts), and by this point, they have a baby. For a few weeks the author was teasing us about names, asking suggestions, musing back and forth about what to use as she hadn't quite decided if the baby would be a boy, girl, or twins.
And just when we thought the names were finalized... it turns out that she named the baby after my dad. In one of our conversations I'd mentioned some geese we had. They were payment-in-kind for some repair work my dad had done on someone's vehicle (this was in the '60s and he had an automotive repair business on our acreage). Instead of eating them, we kept them... an adult gander, two adult geese, and a male gosling. The gander's name was the same as my dad's middle name, so I was telling the fanfic author about these geese, how we'd tease my dad for sharing a name with a goose, how they were better than any watch dog, and how they'd imprinted on my parents (they went for a walk down the country lane one night and didn't realize that all of the geese were following them, walking behind, in single file; the neighbor lady said it was one of the funniest things they'd ever seen; I missed seeing this because I was in BC with my grandparents).
Well, this story evidently made an impression, as the name shared by my dad and the gander is what she named Hermione and Arthur's baby. When I told her later that I was surprised by the name, she said outright that she'd named the baby because of the story I'd told her.
