I want to shake these people! And I ask them, "Don't you ever go to the mall, the grocery store, the doctors? Don't you see people walk down the street, wait at bus stops, slink out their doors while still in their bathrobes, to run and get their morning paper launched into the bushes by the paper boy?"
Potential characters surround us every day, the people at work, the waitress that takes our order, the teenager snapping her gum behind the counter as we drop off our dry cleaning. the guy with the tattoo of a mechanical leg. Believable characters are born from real people, live every day lives and breathe just like the rest of us. But how do we make them take that first breath?

First you need to find a point of view to introduce your character.

"We see the world not as it is, but as we are." goes the old saying, and no where is that more true than in fiction. So use it for your characters. When you want to describe someone, ask yourself first, "Whose impression of the character do I want to give? Do I want to give mine? His own? The antagonist's?"

Some examples: Janet is our character and we're looking for someone to introduce her:

"Janet is a slob. Mom said once she'd grow out of it, but since she lost her apartment and begged me to let her move in with me, I can see that mom wasn't right about a lot of things. Janet never grew out of it and she never learned to be responsible either. I haven't received so much as a nickel in the way of rent and I am constantly cleaning her dishes and picking up her laundry just to get them out of my way."

That is Janet being introduced to us by her sister.

Janet very likely has a different opinion of herself:

"Things got harder for me after Greg died. I couldn't focus at all. It was like entering a world where everyone else was walking on the ceiling and wondering how they got there. I lost my job shortly after that. It was a good job and I had really enjoyed it. With the job went the finances and I lost my apartment. I was grateful my sister asked me to move in with her. I know I'm not much help to her right now but I've spent all my time looking for a new job so I could pay her rent and buy her a huge present for being so good to me when I needed help."

Those two points of view at the beginning of a story set up two totally different emotions. Pay attention to details and how you plan on presenting them since there are ALWAYS three sides to every story:

yours, mine, and the truth.

From every viewpoint you are getting a different side. So when defining your characters, think a moment about who is going to introduce that character to your audience and make sure you are giving them the first impression you want them to have.

Once you introduce your character, make them say something. And make them say something that is defining of them. Nothing is more horrifying to me than lame dialogue. This is really where the "from wood to real boy" comes into play. First, make them speak their age. My teenagers say duh, my children whine, my twenty year olds sound like idealistic college kids, my fifty year olds sound like people who are a little wiser and mature. I hate a book where the six year old, the twenty year old, and the eighty year old all sound the same. People think differently and speak differently as they age. Do not ruin my belief in your character by writing a five year old that speaks like she's thirty! I don't care how precocious she is or how much a prodigy she is, she will still have her own childlike language! Orson Scott Card did an excellent job of this in his Ender's Game. Though the boys in his story were some of the best minds in the world, they were still boys and they had their own language that showed they were children.

Another gripe I need to get out right now is that your characters do not have to say something cute or clever every time they open their mouths. I know your character is cute and I know your character is clever, but if they aren't ever REAL then I cannot believe in them. No one is clever all the time. If you want your character to be real then get to know them. If the dialogue you write could be said by any of your characters then you don't know any of your characters. And if you don't know your characters, they all end up sounding just . . . like . . . YOU.

I know my characters are sounding just like me and not like themselves when they start preaching one of my sermons or spouting my own political agenda. I have all kinds of ideas, political viewpoints, and social beliefs. I'm a very opinionated person. Sometimes it's hard to let your characters think their own thoughts. In Loved Like That, my female protagonist is an earthier, save the world one charity at a time kind of person. I wish I was like that, but I'm not. She also thinks day spas are for wimpy women who are frivolous and silly. Personally, I love a good day spa and if you ever want to send me to one I would jump at the chance. But I had to let her be Kit, not Julie, and Kit is the type of girl to recoil at the mention of a manicure. In order for me to know that I had to really know Kit.

Dialogue is awesome. You don't have to be a grammatical guru to write it. People don't speak properly when talking to one another and they slur their words together. We don't say "you will" We say "you'll." I've heard some people say that dialogue should be a reflection of how people really speak and while to a certain extent I believe that to be true, sometimes I think we go to the extreme. In a lot of conversations there are umm's and errrr's and while now and again that works perfect in dialogue, if your character spends his time with his hands slammed in his pockets "umming" and "erring," your readers are going to skip whole passages to try to get back into the meat of your story . . . or worse, they'll put your book down. Be careful with your dialogue. Mimic reality while making sure to shave out the unnecessary.

Empathy:
Yes you should feel it. If you don't care about your character, then no one else does either. Empathy is understanding and identifying with another's feelings. Empathy helps you to understand why your character must do the things he/she does. If you can't empathize then you have failed to help your readers identify with your characters and ruined the basic strength you might have had for your story. You need to cry when they cry, laugh when they laugh and get ticked when they are wronged.

Sympathy:
No you shouldn't feel it. Sympathy is for wimpy writers. Sympathy is a feeling of pity or sorrow for another's situation. It makes you feel sorry for your characters. It makes you want to ease their burdens. RESIST THIS TEMPTATION. Don't do it . . . The fact is your characters must suffer. Nobody wants to read a book about a protagonist that doesn't have a few lumps to take.

To create real characters you need to get to be a little personable. Get to know new people; find out what makes them tick. Recently I met a lady that would never eat a hamburger at a Wendy's because she hated the idea of eating a square burger on a round bun. I met a guy who never drives the same way to work because he thinks people are always trying to follow him. People are interesting. Get to know some of them. Discover people's likes and dislikes, quirks and passions. By so doing you learn to create three dimensional characters that your readers will not only love, but believe in.