To categorize your characters?

Bonjourno, Maria,
Okay, so I don't speak Italian. But I sound a heck of a lot cooler when I announce my presence in a "Mamma Mia! Pizza, pasta!" kind of way (or I'm just hungry and pining for some musicals). While I agree that the writing should be separate from the self, I always find the characters I create to be an extension of myself. Hence my weird need to constantly write about a girl and her life. Doesn't mean I'm planning on becoming a hippie who gets pregnant and has to decide between getting an abortion and losing a friendship with her Catholic best friend, or keeping the baby, but rather, the main character's reactions would be similar to my own.

But self-like or not, these characters seem to develop thoughts and opinions of their own. When I first start to write a book/short story/ambitious few lines that gets abandoned shortly afterward, I stick my characters and all their motives in their respective places, and all is right with the world. My characters behave quite nicely during chapters 1 and 2, then when I decide that so-and-so is going to do some grocery shopping and run into an ex, they tell me that they'd rather walk down a shady alleyway as a shortcut, meet some new badass friends, and get into trouble with the law because a cute guy with dreads told them to.

Well la dee, da, I tell that character, too bad your future is held at my very fingertips. But the character doesn't listen. It's as though her little feet are padding about my keyboard without my permission. Even when I tell her to get her stinky shoes off my computer, does she obey??

No, no she does not.

One of my author idols, Jodi Picoult, says that oftentimes, when she's in the middle of writing a scene, she'll call a friend and go "you won't believe what this character decided to do!" I can relate. I mean, even though I started off with the intent to fit each character into a nice box with clean intentions and they stumble upon a life-changing moral at the end of the book, I realize that would make them flat characters. Because life is messy. People can't be stuffed into nice little categories. As it turns out, characters are people too.

Or maybe I'm just too lazy to write an outline. That's entirely possibly too.

Peace and Ponies,
Kira