The people (or animals or taking toasters) that populate your world is one aspect of a story that no one overlooks; that doesn't mean it is always done well.
Think about a character that has stuck with you, and one that made you want to put down the book. What was the difference? Often times it is a lack of "personality" within the character. I put this word in quotes because while you characters must have a personality it can't be yours or your cousin Bob's. We'll get into that more later.
There are a lot of different ways to make sure your character has depth, and I will only be addressing a few of them because I feel like this topic has been covered pretty extensively. My focus is to give you a few principles and set you loos on your search engine.
1. Your character must be larger than life.
By larger than life I mean you cannot simply take someone you think is interesting or funny and drop them into your novel. First of all if they find out they can sue you for liable. Second, it turns out that cousin Bob isn't as interesting as you thought.
A character is completely different than a person (otherwise we wouldn't call them characters we would call them people), they have to stand out more than an average Joe who sits on his couch watching TV every night.
You can take certain aspects of Average Joe or Cousin Bob and start with that, but in the end your characters have to be more than a person.
2. Your character must have a desire and an obstacle.
This is one of the things that helps make your character larger than life. We all have desires, whether it be to write a novel or eat a cookie. We all have obstacles that we must overcome to achieve our goals (time, kids, money, lack of cookies, etc.) and this is a source of action within the story and sometimes conflict within the characters.
3. Your characters must be dynamically different.
My good friend Jae and I ran into a problem when we first began revising an old project of hers. She took three of her friends and made them characters. (This was before she knew any better) As she re-wrote, changed, and revised she just couldn't seem to pin down Carolyn. What was her motivation? Her weakness? What was she contributing to the conversation? To the story? The answer was not a lot. She was too similar to the other three characters. This works great in a real world friendship, but not in a story. Within the story she had nothing to contribute that the other three didn't also have. So she got voted out of the novel.
The bottom line is that each character must contribute something different and unique to the story, their strengths must balance out someone else's weaknesses and their weaknesses should be countered by another's strengths.
4. You've got to get to know them!
This is the key to making those beings truly larger than life. You have to get to know them. What are their secrets, fears, hobbies, short comings, strengths, family situation, race, etc.
Sit down as the character and answer the questions or sit down with them and interview them. The key is to keep them in character as you do it. You may be surprised and hopefully their motivations, hesitations and secrets will help you understand why they will or will not do something.
Doing this before you start writing is a great way to prevent getting stuck in your plotting and keeps you from wondering why your character can't/wont do something in your novel.
There are about half a billion character interviews and questionnaires that you can find. I am going to link you to my favorite to get you started. This questionnaire was designed as a character sheet for an RPG, so it works best for fantasy stories, but there are a hundred questions and most of them are applicable to any character.
Homework: Find a questionare and fill it out for at least one of your characters.
P.S. If you don't like the one I provided search engines are you friends!
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