Give Your Characters Shadow Sides.

Silas House writing for the NYTimes in an essay entitled, Tell Their Secrets, wants to know what brings your characters to life.  For us to remember them - for them to endear themselves to us - they must be as multi-faceted and flawed as we are.

Helen Hunt Jackson said, "If you want people to read the truth, write fiction."

I think what she meant is that art imitates life.  And the better you are at writing what life is all about, the more truthful it will appear in your work.

A written work is carried on the backs of its characters.   Take, for example, Jackson's best known work, Ramona: 

"One of the greatest ethical novels of the nineteenth century, this is a tale of true love tested. Set in Old California, this powerful narrative richly depicts the life of the fading Spanish order, the oppression of tribal American communities and inevitably, the brutal intrusion of white settlers. Ramona, an illegitimate orphan, grows up as the ward of the overbearing Senora Moreno. But her desire for Alessandro, a Native American, makes her an outcast and fugitive..."

But as luscious as Ramona sounds, she is as flat as a tortilla: sunny, good-natured, cheerful, resilient, sweet, abiding, and so on.  She bears up with the events that befall her after having chosen to fall in love and run away with someone who is "not of her house."  Flat.

Ramona's step-mother, Senora Moreno, fares much better as an arch-villainess.  You can feel her squirmy, sadistic, scheming ways.  The reader loves to hate her.  Her son, Senor Felipe, wishes he could man-up and do the right thing by his adopted sister who has chosen to run off with the Indian Allessandro, but under the thumb of hs controlling mother he can do little more than drain out of every confrontation as if he were water wrung out of a damp linen suit.  Still, you get the feel of him as a frightened, fearful fellow with the heart of a do-gooder.   

Characters must be flawed.  And they must do the unexpected.  Through them we get to try on the many masks of humanity as we struggle and celebrate our pilgrim lives.