I is for....Interior Landscape
There's a whole world inside a person's head -- John Keats conjures it up as a mansion with many apartments, but I prefer to think of it more as a landscape, an interior landscape. I like the impression of limitless space which this suggests, and the fact that a landscape can be worked upon and changed by light and weather, just as experience shapes the inner self.
It is relatively easy to bring the externals of your character to life -- you can describe how they look, how they dress, how they speak. You can allude to their past and make sure that other players in the story have plenty to say about them too, so that you provide a number of different opinions about them, all of which will help to flesh out a generous picture.
The heart of the matter, the kernel of your hero or heroine, lies beyond the reach of other people, however. Only you as the author have access, and conveying the inner life, the private thoughts, the guilty secrets, the reluctant truths - all the tricky, personal things we prefer not to share with anyone else - should be at the centre of your craft. Without a rich interior landscape to contrast with all the exterior facets, your protagonist will only exist in two dimensions; to bring them fully to life you need to go upcountry and into the interior.
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