The best characters are ones a reader relates to. The reader shares in their joy, celebrates their achievements and empathizes with their grief. Stephen King does an excellent job of making characters in his novels relatable. Readers share the terror the characters face in each sentence, for one reason only; Stephen King took the time to make the characters as real as possible. 

How well do you know your character?

Spending a lot of time creating characters is the daily job of so many of us. We think about names, where they live, who they love, whether or not they have a phobia or a personality disorder. We decide to place our characters in conflict with an antagonist in order to write a novel. We plan an inciting moment, and plot our scenes, but how much do we really know about the psychological motivations of our important characters?

If you are old enough, you probably remember when cameras had something inside them called a film. After taking pictures you had to develop the film, and for the college-aged or younger, developing the film involved hunkering down in a dark room for a good part of the evening with chemicals. After several hours you’d get images on a special piece of paper.