Writing Real Characters--How I Got to Know the Characters in Me (and) Me You may have noticed when you’re in a café that there’s a person sitting there with headphones on, humming to themselves, and seemingly in deep conversation with their own thoughts. See, I’m that person in the café, listening to quiet music, and having conversations with the people who live in my head. This is a weird confession, but my characters feel like real people already. Sometimes I even hear them chatting to me, or to each other. My job as a writer, it seems to me, is to make those characters real to my readers too. I actually follow a series of steps, honed during writing five published novels (and many more unpublished ones). Below I’ve shared these steps with you, just in case any of you have characters chatting to you in your head too. Step One: I search the Internet for a face who looks like the made-up person whispering to me. Here’s a picture of a guy who looks a bit lik...