This is Evelyn. She's seventeen. Loves the rain, asking questions, and eating bread right out of the bag.

She's also a character I started writing last summer.

I've been playing Sims 2 since I was in middle school. I loved decorating the houses, making the cute little babies - but most of all I loved creating the Sims themselves. Seriously, I would sometimes spend two hours in the Create-A-Family mode, move them into a house, and then never play them again. I would also import characters from books that I read and have them marry the characters they should have ended up with. With no regrets.

It wasn't until a few years ago that I started using Sims for a different purpose.

I had my first idea for a book when I was in high school. The project has since been filed away for future use but at my planning stage I was having trouble grounding the images of my characters. I had named them, given them careers, and outlined the basic plot of their story. I just couldn't picture any of it.

One day I was playing Sims, getting bored of the family whose lives I was ruining, when my eye caught the piece of paper where my characters' names were written down (my desk is like a war zone most times so "re-finding" things is a pretty common occurrence). Then, I got what I deem to be one of the best ideas I've ever had: Creating my characters as Sims.

Within a few hours, I had grounded the likeness of all four of my characters into the game, moved them into a house, and started building their backstory. Well, granted, the backstory bit went a bit wonky. As any frequent Sims-player can attest to, sometimes the Sims themselves get a little hard to control and end up running off and doing their own thing. Which is kind of like writing characters - sometimes they dictate their own story. But at the time I didn't know that so it freaked me out and I stopped.

My game has crashed since then and I don't have those characters imported anymore. But I have the Addams family (pun not intended... not really) all created and moved in, which includes Evelyn and her parents. I also plan on importing all of my other original characters into a city I built called Bookville. Not creative at all, I know, but I started the neighborhood not to play necessarily but more to worldbuild.

If you are a writer and have any version of Sims, I highly recommend using it. Especially if you're just getting into writing and having trouble with any aspect of worldbuilding/character building. I used to constantly berate myself for not having any artistic talent but thankfully I found something to remedy that. Hopefully, with this insight I can bestow that relief onto someone else.