941 GUARANTEED WAYS to Write PERFECT CHARACTERS!!!!!

Yeah, right. Sell me a bridge.

We all know there are no guarantees, or any perfection. The trick is to find dependable ways to be good. For that, you gotta "pay your dues" and "put in your time", and we all get tired of hearing that.

Tough.

There are things that can help, though. People say "write what you know," but writers must sometimes write things of which they know little. My hero takes a heavy dose of hallucinogens, but I've never tried them. He kills several people and has to decide how to deal with it. I've never killed anyone.

Some things are simple. I've never been stung by a lionfish. Thank goodness for Google and Wikipedia.

But characters? Every character sees the world differently. I can only write characters I know if each is me or some horrible Mary Sue. That's not what I want, and not what a reader wants.

You'll hear that every character is the heroine of her own story. No one is "just" a sidekick or a plot device. Everyone is in their own egocentric predicament, but how do we show it?

A wife gets up to feed dogs and let them all out. The husband grabs coffee and stumbles to his office. If we say no more, the reader reads what they choose. It's normal and no one thinks twice, or he sympathizes with one and rails at the other. We want him to sympathize with both.

She doesn't ask for help, because she doesn't feel she contributes enough. The eldest can get cereal while caged critters get their care, but she sighs that the husband doesn't help with the toddler before rushing to tweet and check Facebook. She manages not to complain, and life goes on. 

He wants to post that "she feeds the dogs and leaves me hungry." He grinds his teeth over expensive specialty food, vet bills, dog hair in his coffee and the couch they replaced because of the puke, but so few things make her happy. He manages not to complain, and life goes on.

Both are dissatisfied with the other's behavior. Both keep quiet out of love. Both fail to see the other's perspective in any depth, because they are individuals.

Voila! Conflict. Depth. Opportunity for foreshadowing about something later in the book more important than petty differences in preferred morning rituals. A chance for each to be an ass, to learn, to feel chagrined, to grow.

A chance for the reader to vicariously see the world through someone else's eyes. A chance to feel, which is what writing fiction is about.

Make it count.