A few observations about characters:

Some writers obsess about how to create real, living people for their stories.  They needn't, because they can't.  All any of us can create are characters.

Characters are not people. They're much, much simpler.   Somewhere in his On Writing --  highly recommended as a manual of technique -- Stephen King notes that, compared to the simplest of real people, the most complexly, carefully drawn character in a story is "nothing but a bag of bones."

People have lives.  Characters only have roles within a story.  They have no other existence than within the story, even if they seem to live on in your head after you finish reading.

Take Yossarian in Catch-22, a story about a man being driven to make a choice between two evils, one of which will kill him physically, the other morally.  We come to know a lot about Yossarian in the context of his situation and his dilemma.

But where did he go to school?  Does he have brothers and sisters?  What's his favorite color?  Is his navel an innie or an outie?

We don't know.  We don't even know his first name, John, until well into the second half of the novel.  That's because we don't need to know.  Probably Joseph Heller didn't know when he created Yossarian.

Characters always have problems.  Or agendas.  They all have something to do, because they're all part of a story, and stories are about doing.  If you have a character in your story who doesn't actually do anything to make the story happen, you have to ask yourself, "What's this guy doing here?" 

If you can't give the character a role in the story, then he's not part of the story, and you'd be better to take him out -- even if you carefully drew him based upon your recollections of your most beloved high-school teacher. 

Characters have two kinds of problems:  external and internal.  Major characters' problems, whether innies or outies, are big -- see Yossarian's case above.

Minor characters can have big external problems if the story requires it, but they don't need big internals, because the story is mostly about the major characters, and you just don't need to make every card in the deck a king or a queen.

A major character's external and internal problems interrelate.  Dumbo can't fly until he has self-esteem, and he can't have self-esteem until he flies.  Yossarian has to find a way to live without being part of a senseless killing machine, and he does it by realizing that there's a third option to which he's been willfully blind.

Bringing the character to a climactic point where the external and internal problems satisfactorily resolve is what storymaking is largely all about.

There are various ways to reveal character.  In ascending order of usefulness, they are:

·         the narrator tells us what the character is like;

·         other characters tell us what the character is like;

·         the character himself tells us what he is like;

·         we see what the character is like by what he does.

Although modern literary fiction often goes to great lengths to use the first technique, it is not recommended for genre authors.  You are a lot better off if you show your character in action -- that is, in characteristic action -- because characters are what they do.

And that characteristic action should involve conflict, because there is no story without conflict.  People have tried to boil down the essentials of story to twelve or ten or seven basic plots.  I reduce them to three:  man versus man;  man versus the universe;  man versus himself (for "man" you can read: woman, boy, girl, robot, alien, talking rabbit, typing cockroach).

Whether you get it down to twelve, seven, or three, the key word in each one is "versus."  Stories are struggles.  Whether the characters win, lose, or (as with Yossarian), transcend the conflict you set for them, they struggle to get something done -- even if, as with Hamlet, it's just to make up their minds.