When characters come knocking....

I used to pride myself on using people, places, and memories as fodder for my stories. Naturally, there's nothing wrong with that. I love looking at a character I created out of spare parts--say the quirky laughter of a friend, plus the body of a cousin, the tremendous empathy I have always loved in someone I no longer knew. It's beautiful to take the vistas, climate, and venues of different locales and create a new one. There's a certain satisfaction in pulling beloved bits and pieces together and making something special out of them.
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Still, I wondered how some authors wrote about characters they say simply came knocking. Nothing could have prepared me for the day two such characters arrived on the doorstep of my imagination. Whoa! They showed up pretty much complete in terms of pasts, traits, and emotional scarring. I had no real world experiences--and I mean none--involving the sorts of lives they had lived. Still, they were begging me to spin some sort of tale for them to star in. They wouldn't leave my head.

And I had the best time. They brought me out of my writing shell--surely, I could never write the private scenes they wanted me to write. No way would I know how to set the effects of their emotional scars on a page; I had been fairly lucky in my own life to avoid such tragedies.

Yet there they were ... Ren Hayden and Galen Zabriese, and a host of other characters who came along for the ride. But would my work pass the final test? Had I made them real to the reader? Had I placed them in a story worth reading? Had writing sex scenes for the first time been a mistake? 

With reviews finally coming in, I can say I think I nailed it. But then I have to wonder if I can take the credit. I mean, the weirdest part about having characters simply pop into your head is ... you never know who really created them!