You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
What an audience decides about where certain characters come from is really up to them.
In order to make characters real - no matter what the character is doing - you have to see yourself as capable of having done that.
I always want the audience to identify with my character in some way. I mean, sometimes you'll get characters that aren't very identifiable. Sometimes you can't relate to your character at all. I think it's important to keep the audience interested. But the best advice that I've gotten is to live in the moment.
You want to feel that your reader does identify with the characters so that there's a real entry into the story - that some quality speaks to the individual.
If I can get the audience to connect with the characters emotionally - and they love who they are, they love the larger-than-life situation that they're in, but most of all get the audience invested in the characters - then I always feel like I can sort of put them in the most outrageous circumstances, and the audience is okay to go with that.
Part of the success of the show is that the audience sees themselves in the characters, becomes the characters. The more they inhabit the characters, the more they see.
Creating a character is about what they look like. The look speaks volume to the audience.
To me, my characters are more real than most people I meet.
And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.
All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it's not real. I'm living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I'm writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well.