My Favourite Characters (series introduction)

"If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats." -Richard Bach

 Good characters make good stories.  Great characters make great stories, stories that reach into our emotions, tickle our funny bone, and make us think and sometimes cry. Great characters are real.  Great characters are people we never forget.

I'm excited to be working on a blog series on some of my favourite characters.  Starting tomorrow, I'll be posting a character a week, counting down 10 of my most favourite fictional people (both from books and the silver screen).  These characters have affected me.  They're very real.  And I've learned much from them.

Here's a few quotes about characters to end off:

"A writer should create living people; people, not characters.  A character is a caricature." -Ernest Hemingway

"It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does." -William Faulkner

 "All characters are based on elements of a writer's personal experience." Robert Holdstock

"The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail." -Mark Twain

"Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language." -Hilma Wolitzer

"The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person."  -Robert Oppenheimer