Creating Believable Fictional Characters

As someone who reads quite a bit it is my view that the best fictional characters are those who are people I can imagine in real life. I could see this character outside of the book.

One of my three favourite authors is Jack Hggins. He has a recurring character named Sean Dillon. When I read one of those books I can see Dillon. He is someone that is a real live person. The situations Dillon finds himself in are believable for his type of character - the rogue.

One of Higgins' books starring Sean Dillon was made into a movie - "On Dangerous Ground". Sean Dillon is described as a small man no more than five foot five with hair so fair that it is almost white and the coldest blue eyes that they are like ice. Rob Lowe was cast as Sean Dillon in the movie "On Dangerous Ground". I could not find the movie believable. Rob Lowe was nothing like Higgins' description of Sean Dillon.

While it is common place for Hollywood to take a good bit of poetic license when making a book into a movie, but they should at least hold to the character descriptions. It is those characters that really make the book or movie believable.

Another of my favourite authors Clive Cussler and his recurring character Dirk Pitt who is a sort of sea adventurous James Bond - he gets the bad guy and the girl.

I did not like "Sahara", not because it was necessarily a bad movie or that they changed the way the book was written; but because none of the people in the movie fit the description of the characters in the book. It no longer was the story that Clive Cussler had written. The characters were not believable. It felt all wrong.

To create a believable fictional character will more likely be more real if that character begins with the outline of a live person or persons. Taking characteristics from people who exist in the real world.

In an interview Clint Eastwood once said that he liked characters who had some kind of flaw. No one is perfect and no fictional character should be either.

Of course, none of this matters when writing a fantasy story or book