When you put your characters in a dire situation, they often do things that surprise even you, so you have to go back and revise your original conception of who they are.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think every writer will tell you that their characters are always partially themselves: who I am and what I've experienced. It's always there in part of my characters.
Characters are often revealed by the ways they misapprehend others.
My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.
All of my characters are a little bit based on people I know in real life. You know when you do that you have to change the character a little bit in case your friend or your relative reads the book, because you don't want them to know you wrote about them... They might get mad.
Things present themselves to you, and it's how you choose to deal with them that reveals who you are. We all say a lot of things, don't we, about who we are and how we think. But in the end it's your actions, how you respond to circumstance that reveals your character.
The goal is to have every character take on a life of his or her own. Sometimes characters will come into the story that I haven't planned.
Because characters are your creations, you are the one who ultimately gets to decide their fate.
I treat all my characters as if they were real, and I am scrupulous about the details of their lives.
One of the ways that you reveal character is by getting a character into a situation and seeing what they do.
Often you find the character through the things they say. How they talk about other people, how they describe themselves - which is very rare.
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