Character Creation

I do love to write. While I certainly enjoy the fantasy setting, and think you can do a lot of neat things with it, the story won't work if the characters are uninteresting, or the characters don't become real enough, or for some reason the reader just doesn't feel invested in them. One of the books we read recently in the Cooper Book Club is Gardens of the Moon. While I did like the book, I didn't like it nearly as much as most other books, because I never really came to care much about the characters, except for a couple small exceptions. Otherwise, it didn't really matter to me what happened to them, and to me, that weakened the entire story. You have to care about what happens to the characters in the story.

This is going to be something that I try to do in my writing. I have no idea whether I have succeeded or not, because I am looking at the characters from a different point of view than the readers. It's very interesting to me to write a character, because for me, once the character is created, they start to take on a life of their own. I can envision each of them in my mind; they become real to me. Yes, I am the one writing them, but once I have designed the character in a certain way, it no longer becomes "What do I want this character to do next?", it becomes "What do I think this character would do next?" It is odd, but I start caring about the characters in a book I'm writing long before the book has even finished a rough draft. Creating a character makes you care about it, and even though I am the one writing it, I am excited to see what happens next in the character's life.