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.
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By the same token, each of your characters has an emotional acre that they tend, or donât tend, in certain specific ways. One of the things you want to discover as you start out is what each personâs acre looks like. What is the person growing, and what sort of shape is the land in? This knowledge may not show up per se in what you write, but the point is that you need to find out as much as possible about the interior life of the people you are working with.
If you realize that you have done this, you need to stop and look at your characters again. Youâve got to go into these people, and since you donât know them, this means that you need to go into you, wonderful you, who has so many problems and idiosyncrasiesâyou, 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 youâll see things from their point of view. You need to trust that youâve 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 youâve observed in the world.
If your deepest beliefs drive your writing, they will not only keep your work from being contrived but will help you discover what drives your characters. You may find some really good people beneath the packaging and posingâpeople whom we, your readers, will like, whose company we will rejoice in. We like certain characters because they are good or decentâthey internalize some decency in the world that makes them able to take a risk or make a sacrifice for someone else. They let us see that there is in fact some sort of moral compass still at work here, and that we, too, could travel by this compass if we so choose.
So the acknowledgment that in the midst of ourselves there is still a good part that hasnât 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.