Squinky, have you ever read
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott? It's her reflections on writing (and life). It's about writing stories (be they novels, short stories, etc). However, she has a chapter on Character. The first bit really reflects what you described in your latest article (in terms of character development).
Quote:
Knowledge of your characters also emerges the way a Polaroid develops: it takes time for you to get to know them. One image that helps me begin to know the people in my fiction is something a friend once told me. She said that every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own...
...And as long as you don't hurt anyone, you really get to do with your acre as you please. You can plant fruit tress or flowers or alphabetized rows of vegetables, or nothing at all. If you want your acre to look like a giant garage sale, or an auto wrecking yard, that's what you get to do with it...
...By the same token, each of your characters has an emotional acre that they need to tend, or don't tend, in certain specific ways. One of the things you want to discover as you start out is what each person's acre looks like. Waht is the person growing, and what sort of shape is the land in? This knowledge may not show up per se in what you write, but the point is that you need to find out as much as possible about the interior life of the people you are working with...
Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them.
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Also in her chapter on Plot:
Quote:
Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen.
Characters should not, conversely, serve as pawns for some plot you've dreamed up.
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I offer this as a non writer myself but I thought the whole book was fascinating.
