Whatever your characters do or say will be born out of who they are, so you need to set out
to get to know each one as well as possible. One way to do this is to look within your own heart, at the different facets of your personality. You may find a con man, an orphan, a nurse, a king, a hooker, a preacher, a loser, a child, a crone. Go into each of these people and try to capture how each one
feels, thinks, talks, survives.

If you realize that you have done this, you need to stop and look at your characters again. You’ve got to go into these people, and since you don’t know them, this means that you need to go into you, wonderful you, who has so many problems and idiosyncrasies—you, who will be able to figure out what is true for these people and hence, what they would or would not do in a given situation.

The better you know the characters, the more you’ll see things from their point of view. You need to trust that you’ve got it in you to listen to people, watch them, and notice what they wear and how they move, to capture a sense of how they speak. You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.

So the acknowledgment that in the midst of ourselves there is still a good part that hasn’t been corrupted and destroyed, that we can tap into and reclaim, is most reassuring. When a more or less ordinary character, someone who is both kind and self-serving, somehow finds that place within where he or she is still capable of courage and goodness, we get to see something true that we long for. This is what helps us connect with your characters and with your book. This is what makes it a book we will foist on our friends, a book we will remember, that will accompany us through life.

By studying some of the most beautiful examples of people whose latent potential popped into view when they came into frame, I became increasingly attuned to seeing and sensing the encodings and fire of those around me.

Then one day, I woke up to realize that my entire emotional state had changed, not just in my work, but across my entire life. Instead of feeling frustrated with what people are not, I’d made a monumental shift to feeling grateful for what they are. I wish I’d made this shift decades earlier but as the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed out, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.