BUILDING YOUR CHARACTERS INTO BONA FIDE PEOPLE
IT was Ray Bradbury who said, “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”
Without characters, you don’t have a story. And to take that one step further, without characters the reader will care about, you still don’t have a story. Flat characters are the death of a narrative. That’s why I love Ernest Hemingway’s classic quote: “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters.”
Then there’s my favorite quote about character, from Yiyun Li: “Your characters are like children. You give birth to these children, but you have to send them into the world,
