What stuff is your characters built of?

Some writers do not like this type of thread. But, if writers can’t talk about their craft…what have we become? I started a thread on a different forum, and was kicked off the forum for the thread. That thread has had over 3,000 hits, and gets more each day. Strange, they now agree with my comments.

An exercise in character building.
Do the characters in your stories have true feelings? Are their feelings correct? If you are a white writer, can you build a true black character? If you are black, can you build a Jewish character? If not, your audience of readers will be limited to one race of people…your own.
Before the civil rights movement most black people smiled, and said , “Yes Sir.” Is that how they really felt? No, it was not. How can a non-black writer express the true feelings of a black character?
Try this…Pretend the Government took all of your rights away. They could take everything from you. They could beat, and kill you. You had to bite your tongue,
smile, and say, “Yes Sir.” In that situation, how would you feel?
Don’t just make up a character…build one from true feelings.
Some think this is a new time for people, and the past is the past. Don’t fall for that lie, it’s not true. If you think I’m wrong, call a Jew a Nazi, and Italian a WOP, a Black person a Nigger, an American Indian a Savage. A Mexican a Wet back. A White person a White Cracker.

How do you build character feelings?

Carl Jung says that we all have, not only a personal unconscious, but a collective one as well. Within each individual's collective unconscious are archetypes: inherited patterns of thought, images, and character elements that cross cultural lines and are inherent in human behavior. In addition to the collective unconscious and its archetypes, we have several elements that make up our whole selves. There is the persona - the role we play when we are dealing woth others, the ego, the part of us that has the sense of "I"-ness, the shadow, where we hide our dark tendencies, and in men, an anima, or internal female side, of an animus if we are women, which is our internal masculine.

The more open we are, the more accepting of who we are, the less we rely on our ego and/or our persona to protect us, the more we have access to our whole selves.

Everyone of us has had times we were treated unfairly, have suffered humiliation and rejection. Everyone of us have also known time of being loved and in love, of being treated like royalty by someone, and everyone of us has had experiences of the other - the people we encounter along the way, and most of us are aware, at some level, of a connection with that other.

Creating characters is a bit like acting. We look inside ourselves and find that part of us that is like the character we want to create. We put ourselves in that character's place and imagine her speech patterns, his approaches to live,the effect of probable experiences on that personality, and we draw from all of that.

The more open we are, the better we know ourselves, the easier it will be to create believable characters.

Ann