Fictional Characters Are Not People With Lives

In creating fictional characters, you need to come up with personality traits and motivations that dovetail specifically with the spark of your story. Great characters make a story but it's also hard to find them in real life. Finding a character out in the real world who is not only as functional as the thing, but who can also actually talk and express himself isn't an easy job. You've got to design faults into a character. If you don't, they will never make the wrong choices, and your story will be very, very short and very boring. I always started my stories with characters. But there it is, the crux of the problem. I thought of them as people with