Talk:Author Authority/@comment-27933913-20170219173717/@comment-5651818-20170408083636

Some authors swear that some of their characters exist independently of them and the story.

Neil Gaiman: "Lucifer didn’t want to be my mouthpiece. More than any other character I’ve ever written, he insisted on going his own way.…[M]y protagonist turned out to belong to that rare subspecies of characters who—to paraphrase Neil…—have their own lives off the page and move while you’re not looking."

William Blake had famously written in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton was “of the Devils party without knowing it[.]” In the Blakean reading of Paradise Lost, the poem’s sublime Satan essentially sprang forth uncontrollably from Milton’s mind, just as Sin burst unbidden out of Satan’s head (II.749–58). The Puritan Milton, in a Frankensteinian sense, lost control of his creature, his monster. Satan could not escape the will of the God who was writing his fate, but he somehow broke free from the will of the poet who was writing his lines.

So, yeah. Depends.