Now, your characters are complex and often conflicted. Though they inhabit a world that you’ve created, they seem real, and clearly readers feel that they can relate to them. How do you balance keeping your characters true to their world, but relevant to ours?
(in a tired voice) I don’t care whether they’re relevant to ours. I try to keep them true to themselves, which is not difficult really—I know what sort of person each character is supposed to be; I know what experiences that character has had, and how those experiences have changed that character, or not changed that character—so, it’s very simple. I’ve often said, “I created these people. I’m an Old Testament God with my fist in the middle of their lives.” It’s very easy to run them.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.