: Re: How to make characters more than the words on the page? At the time of writing this question there are 5337 Harry Potter questions on SciFi and a further 165 on Movies. Many of these questions

@Sarah872

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How do I explain this? Most of the people people know are people, most people are good with people, most people also like people and have enough empathy to see people as "whole" even when they don't know everything about them. This makes most people good at filling in missing details when it comes to people shaped objects, such as fictional characters. Good characters, those with enough details that they look like people to most people, therefore do a lot of the work but readers fill in more of their personality than they usually realise.

The question is what details and how many of them you need to use to reach the threshold at which readers take over and finish the humanising process. This can vary greatly from reader to reader, and I can't really answer for the average person. I'm not a people person, to put it mildly, so if I'm going to invest in a character it takes a lot more detail than it does for most people. I need to understand the person-ness of a character in order to invest in them and tell the extra parts of their story that the author can't include, this means that, to me, the details that are important are those of personality, speech, and habit.

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