The character actually brings everything you need to know
into the novel.
From the clothes they wear, to the educations they have,
to the passion seething in their heart, to the coldness inside them.
And that’s why I call characters
Beasts of Burden because they carry everything that’s important in the novel.
There’s a famous saying:
I would never write about someone who is not already at the end of his rope.
You want to feel like that character is a different person at the end of the book.
The character must be a different person. They have to be changed somehow.
You take a character or any person’s, deepest, darkest fear.
And then you make it happen.
And then you make them go through it and come full circle from where you start
a book to where you end a book.
What are their goals? What can happen to knock those goals down
as you’re writing, as you’re going along?
I really like to torture these people. It’s not very nice.
I think that intelligent character design understands that anybody who is
in the world is the center of their own story.
They think they’re right. They’re doing heroic work,
and everybody else is kind of dumb or doing something for a wrong reason.
So getting inside the head of your villain and being able
to see the villain’s perspective,
just as well as you would see your hero’s perspective,
is I think the mark of a mature writer and believable writing.
You want people to feel like they’re with those people.
They’re in that story. They’re living it. So for me,
I think character is so important, that it’s probably the biggest part
of my writing structure.
Even more than plot is really understanding who my people are.
And sometimes they surprise me when I’m writing,
which sounds funny to a non-writer, but you’re writing dialogue
and all of a sudden the character says something that you hadn’t expected.
And I usually go, oh, that’s good! I gotta go with that.
Your audience absolutely has to care about your character.
Your characters are what draws them into the story.
It’s what makes them continue reading, turning pages,
coming back to the next book in the series.
If they don’t care about your characters, then they don’t care about your book.
And they’re not gonna continue reading it.