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.
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And finally, as the portrait comes into focus, you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what
we need, and who we think we are.
You couldnât have had any way of knowing what this piece of work would look like when you first started. You just knew that there was something about these people that compelled you, and you stayed with that something long enough for it to show you what it was about.
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.
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.
This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense ofâplease forgive meâwonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious.
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.