Character Independence

I love writing.
Especially designing characters.
Weaving together their personalities, their actions, their appearances and their relationships with other characters that I also created.
Filling a fictional world with beings who can interact with it.
Changing it in subtle ways from real life, to make it unique.
Even giving characters arbitrary power over other characters, and seeing how they use it, after the characters begin to take control of their own lives, which happens more often than you'd think.
But I'd never known if this meant the writer was a strong, almost god-like creator of independent characters in this world that is his own, or a weak, invisible being, just narrating the lives of beings that have usurped the reins of their fate from the transcendent being who scribbled life into them.