A real character

So we see the story world through the eyes of our characters,  but how do we make these recorders of the scene and the action real?  And for an SF writer there's an additional question to be answered.  How do we make our characters real and believable even though their beliefs and values, and the way they live and look, may be nothing like us and our lives.

But whether a character is alien or human, what defines them is what they do.  I'm thinking now of Pyanfar Chanur in CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur.  When a human fugitive runs onto her ship she chooses to keep him, and later to defend him against other species who want to use him as a political pawn. Her one choice comes to dictate the next several years of her life, and gets her ship shot at and her crew in danger.

Getting readers to really care about a character means more than making them into all-action heroines though.  If that was all there was to a character they might end up looking like a shallow thrill-seeker rather tan the authoritative figure we intended.  We have to get the reader to identify with our characters on a deeper level.

We want readers to feel empathy with our characters.  And we can empathise with any character, if we draw them properly.  Even our villains must have something we can empathise with.  We can understand their their passion for art or music, or their charismatic persona, even when we don't like their motives.  We want our reader to feel sympathy for our good characters.  We want readers to identify with them, to think that perhaps they too might find the courage to be so heroic if they were thrust into the same situation.

Which gives the SF writer who wants to write about aliens a bit of a problem.  If we make their beliefs and values so different from ours that we can't identify with them we will have a problem drawing the reader into our story.  What we are really responding to in characters is their underlying humanity.  And even if those characters are alien, they need to have their own version of humanity.  Underneath their strange cultural rituals we want to know that they have some recogniseable concepts of good and evil, the recognition that life is precious and is to be preserved.

Making characters real is about giving them the ring of truth, creating the feeling that yes, that is the only action they would have taken in that situation.  It's about making them feel authentic, about giving them the truth of the human heart - even when they're not.