Bringing Characters to Life

I’ve been talking about fictional character as illusion, created out of my own psyche or borrowed from the world around me.

I find it a fascinating concept to sort, even after nearly forty years of writing fiction. The question of how characters are brought to seeming life is never fully answered, partly because the process changes from writer to writer and story to story and partly because it remains somewhat mysterious, even for the one writing the fiction.

Let me extend the discussion into t...