…The reason why people connected with the characters is because they are real, and to write real characters you have to go deep into them. As a human you look at another human and you come with your own judgements, but as a writer you have to put that aside and just look at people for who they are. It is a process, and much of it is subconscious…

You want the reader to care about your characters — if they don’t, then there’s no emotional involvement. But at the same time, I want my characters to be nuanced, to be gray, to be human beings. I think human beings are all nuanced. There’s this tendency to want to make people into heroes and villains. And I think there are villains in real life and there are heroes in real life. But even the greatest heroes have flaws and do bad things, and even the greatest heroes are capable of love and pain and occasionally have moments where you can feel sympathetic for them.

I rarely take the characteristics of someone I know and make them a complete fictional character, except maybe with truly minor characters who only play a small role. All of my characters are more like the Frankenstein monster, having been stitched together using multiple real people. The classic advice to any writer is "write what you know". So in order to create believable characters, you have to write about people you know.

If an author would have us feel a strong degree of compassion, his characters must not be too perfect.

We tried to make our characters as human and empathetic as possible. Instead of merely emphasizing their super feats, we attempted to make their personal life and personal problems as realistic and as interesting as possible. We wanted to make them seem like real people whom the reader would like to spend time with and want to know better.

When you're writing a character, you have to know where they're coming from. You may never use that information, but you have to know it. It just helps you mark the journey better.

I usually begin with the idea of a character and then work on getting to know the character better. I’ve learned from actors that if I try to embody my characters physically, by walking, talking, and even dressing like them, then my characters become more real to me and therefore more believable on the page.

A writer often wants to change a reader’s perception about the world, which is a political act. But we have to work through character, so helping the reader to feel close to fictional characters is the gate through which we have to usher the reader. I am one of those writers who hopes to use character as a way of introducing the reader to a new way of thinking about the world.

I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty and very bad and very cruel. And if they're ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That I think is fun and makes an impact.

By saying that all my characters have a little bit of me in them, I mean that I try to be invested and empathetic in all my characters—whether they are principal or secondary, deeply flawed and not very “nice.” If you’re in tune with your story then the characters do come at you organically. There isn’t an order to how they might appear.

I want characters to do the things I am afraid to do for fear of making myself more unlikable than I may already be. I want characters to be the most honest of all things - human.

Your character has sort of basic fundamental traits and beliefs and you remind yourself of those, then you’re really just present with the person and the writers do such a great job.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

The most important thing an author can do is to be authentic, to be true to the times and the character - what the character would say and do. To be called “Black” during Mary’s time would have been an insult.