I filled out a little online writer’s thing about “How Do You Create Your Characters?”. Here’s what I posted:

For the most part, my characters just crawl out of some part of my brain and insert themselves into my stories. Even when I start with a goal in mind, the characters quickly write themselves, and often act in ways I did not anticipate or expect. For me, writing a story is very much a process of watching the story unfold in my head and simply transcribing what I see.

I often get an image in my head of a character, and then start asking, “Who is this person? What do they want? What’s that cool sword they’re carrying?” The answers just come to me. I start writing and see where it goes.

Obviously, all these people living in my head come from somewhere. They’re a mix of different aspects of my personality, bits of other people I know, iconic characters from other fiction or from history. My subconscious takes all these fragments and assembles them into someone. When I try to force a character, to create someone explicitly to fit some role or need in a story, or to serve as a specific foil or plot device, it’s a difficult and painful process. It’s much easier to relax, lose myself in the imagined world, and see who walks “on stage” to take up the part they need to play. The process of editing, correcting, adjusting, and so on, is, for me, something akin to checking my sources and verifying my facts — I realize I’d gotten someone’s family history wrong, or misquoted them in some dialog. I’m not changing the characters, I’m correcting the mistakes I made when I first wrote down the story they told me. When I look back on my writing, I can always tell where I was working too hard to impose my idea of what the story *should* be; those are the parts which are forced, awkward, and unnatural. The best parts are where I was simply smashing keys as fast as I could, copying down what was happening in my head in real time.

If your characters aren’t alive in your mind, they’ll never be alive on the page.