The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [10]
Good fiction characters also tend to be more understandable than real-life people. They do the things they do for motives that make more sense than real-life motives often do. While they're more mercurial and colorful, they're also more goal-motivated. Readers must be able to understand why your character does what he does; they may not agree with his motives, but you have carefully set things up so at least they can see that he's acting as he is for some good reason.
In all these ways fiction characters are not just different than life. They're better. Bigger. Brighter. More understandable. Nicer or meaner. Prettier or uglier. And ultimately more fascinating.
I can almost hear your silent protest: "But I want to write realistic fiction." Good. So do I. Yet, to convey an illusion of realism, you as a good fiction writer can never transcribe real people; you must build your characters, taking aspects of real people and exaggerating some angles while suppressing others, adding a bit of Charlie's choleric nature to Archibald's pathos, tossing in some of Andrew's brittle way of talking, salting with your own list of tags that you made up from your imagination, sticking on the motives, plans, hopes and fears that you made up as the author for this character because they're what you as the author need to have in this particular stow.
Even the names of your characters are constructed. "Brick Bradley" by his very name is a different character from "Percy Flower" "Mother Theresa" can never be the same kind of person as a "Dolores LaRue" Even your character names are constructs, not reality.
And consider character background In real life, a young woman may come out of a poverty-stricken rural background and still somehow become the president of a great university. Except in a long novel, where you might have sufficient space to make it believable, you would have a hard time selling this meshing of background and present reality in fiction. Chances are that in a short story you would make up a far different background for your female university president, perhaps constructing an early life as the favorite or only daughter of a college professor mother and physician father. (In short fiction, characters and their backgrounds are almost always much more consistent than people in real life.)
Motivation? Again, fictional characters are better than life. In real life, people often seem to do things for no reason we can understand. They act on impulses that grow out of things in their personalities that even they sometimes don't understand. But in fiction there is considerably less random chance. While good characters are capable of surprising readers—and should sometimes do so for verisimilitude—such characters are always understandable on fairly simple later analysis.
To put this point another way, in real life people often don't make sense. But in fiction, they do.
The author sees to that.
Just as she sees to many other things about her characters, remembering always that fiction people are not real people.
It's just one of several ways that fiction surpasses and improves upon life. And that's a good thing, isn't it? After all, if fiction were really just like life, why would we have to have it at all? What need would it meet? Who would care about it?
We spin tales... make up story people. None of it is real, and therein lies its beauty. In your stories, as in all the stories ever told, you must hold the magnifying glass up to your people and events for readers to appreciate them at all...