Whether you write about spies or space aliens, hobbits or horse traders, one requirement remains the same: Your characters must be realistic, believable - in a word, alive. And while you could spend years researching the details of your characters' backgrounds and painstakingly describing every corpuscle of their physical appearance, in the end only one thing really matters. To be real and enduring, the life you breathe into your characters must come from the core of your own humanity, your understanding of what it means to be human.

Rediscovering your own deeply buried emotions and memories can be the most challenging - and rewarding - part of creating realistic fictional characters. If you don't already keep a journal, start one. Push yourself beyond merely recording your day-to-day experiences. Explore your underlying motivations and reactions: Why did you answer your boss that way? How did you feel when you heard that news about an old friend? Give free rein to your hopes and dreams: Is there somewhere else you'd rather be? Where? And what is really stopping you from going there right now - fear? laziness? a sense of responsibility? If you can probe deeply and honestly enough into your own motives, you'll be well on your way to understanding what makes your characters tick.

But how can you transfer this increased self-awareness to your characters? Through two psychological shortcuts we all use to help us relate to real people: projection and empathy.

When you project your own feelings and attitudes onto others, you assume they love, hate, desire, and fear the same kinds of things you do, and for pretty much the same reasons. This works well for the universal human traits that evolution has hardwired into our psyches: No matter who we are, it's usually safe to assume loud noises will startle us, rotten food will disgust us, and giant, flesh-eating spiders will scare us out of our wits. In real life, though, while projection may help you predict how other members of your in-group will react, you'll quickly get into trouble if you project your own likes and dislikes onto strangers who don't share your background or biases. Fortunately, fictional characters are more flexible; and if you tend to create your heroes or heroines in your own image, projection will cover a lot of ground.

Sooner or later, however, no matter how autobiographical your characters are, they'll find themselves facing problems you've never faced, doing things you'd never

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