Half asking for myself, half a general question.I've forgotten or never learned how to love my characters.Is the most important thing to see the world in their eyes?How did the great authors do it? How do you do it?
>So true are these avowals at the present day, that I can now only take the reader into one confidence more. Of all my books, I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is>DAVID COPPERFIELD.Dickens
>>25277012There are different ways you can go about it. You can be an observer, write about the people you met in your life, take their habits, mannerisms, speech patterns and write them down faithfully in your book.You can also write different facets of yourself into different characters. The pious one, the doubting one, the passionate one, the one with the capacity for evil - that's how Dostoevsky wrote TBK, he wrote the internal debates he keeps having inside himself.You can also give up on writing realistic characters and have them be either a rhetorical force (Lear, Ahab) or just a vehicle for ideas, as Menippean Satires do it.There is no one answer. You can make them as subtle or as grotesque as you like, it's all up to your individual artistic vision.
>>25277012identities and personalities = blocks on desire, injunctions to judge and label, to pathologise or praise in the terms of pop psychology and jordan-peterson ethics.love the world that opens up to your character, to the external forces they mingle with and set in motion, to their body's particular form of movement through the world and the secret passages they bring to light. love how they form new assemblages with other bodies, faces, speech-machines. love is desire moving too fast to be captured by organs, identities, forms of recognised value.this is why all good writing moves fast, even when nothing seems to be happening. and it's why all mass-market hackwork feels lifelessly slow and void of desire.does any of this make any sense? perhaps not. but it's very important.
>>25277012Good writers love them very much. It often happens that a writer tries to create a bad character, but later she falls in love with him herself, as is the case with Goncharov's Oblomov, as is the case with Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
>>25277046Very concise and wonderful answer. Thank you. I would likely do the second; the first seems like too much work and I don't go out too much (though maybe watching videos is a somewhat passable substitude), and the third seems annoying and inhuman when overdone. However, I feel like the second is the main way to be able to love your characters.
>>25277059I think I understand in general, you're saying that networks of characters are what really create the love. A single character monologuing about himself is pretty hard to love, but when people have relationships and interactions (and thus, a "world" forms), that is when love can blossom.As an example from anime, Ponsuka surprised me recently because of how lovable the world (and of course thus all the characters) were.
You write until your characters take a life of their own and become thought-forms, and until you only become an observer writing down what they are doing of their own volition
