Creating characters

Here's an essay by the critic James Woods (courtesy Alexander Chee) that raises interesting questions about what a fully realized character is in fiction. I was particularly drawn to a passage where Woods quotes the novelist Iris Murdoch, and I went looking for the essay he quoted from.

It's here: The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited, from the Yale Review of 1959. I will quote a little more than Woods did:

Art is not an expression of personality, it is a question rather of the continual expelling of oneself from the matter in hand. Anyone who has attempted to write a novel will have discovered this difficulty in the special form which it takes when one is dealing with fictitious characters. Is one going to be able to present any character other than oneself who is more than a conventional puppet? How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense "interested in other people," this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a real character who is not oneself. It is impossible, it seems to me, not to see one's failure here as a sort of spiritual failure.

This is instructive for me as I begin another draft of my India book specifically to strengthen the main character.

technorati: novel writing, Iris Murdoch, characterization, Alexander Chee, James Woods, literary criticism