Snagging Ideas from Others on Characters

So, rather than reinvent the wheel, I am researching what published authors have said about writing, starting with creating characters. I pulled the bit below from Jim Butcher's Live Journal. While he doesn't update it anymore, it has a wealth of awesome information about his writing process, and as he has done what I hope to -- mainly, succeeded, he seems like a good person to take advice from. (The below is from Jim Butcher's LiveJournal) Characters So your story is all about conflict, right? And you can't have conflict without, well, people. Maybe your people look like sentient renaissance mice, or maybe they look like talking cats, but there are going to be beings running around your story with a bunch of conflicting desires. Those are your characters. Sticking with the purely craft-oriented standpoint, we'll start with a basic question: what makes a good character? FIRST AND FOREMOST, FICTION WRITERS, YOUR CHARACTERS MUST BE INTERESTING. I mean, come on. Who is going to want to read about boring people? I can do that in the newspaper, or in any history class. Increasingly, as our society moves into the MTV-Information-broadband-instant-gratification age, reader tolerance for the dull and the plain is going to go down. Bottom line: without interesting characters, your book is already dead. You can write something that flies in the face of this if you like, and people the story town of Plainsville with John Smiths, and who knows, maybe you'll create an immortal piece of literary art. But for poor slobs like me whose sons are suddenly wearing larger shoes than them, and who are looking with mild panic at the costs of a college degree, there are a couple of basic principles to think about which could really help you in all kinds of ways. Which leads us to the next logical question: What is (or what makes) an interesting character? While no one thing can really stake a sole claim, several things consistently make a team contribution: o Exaggeration. o Exotic position. o Introduction. o Verisimilitude. o Empathy. (From Jim Butcher's LiveJournal.) That's about all I dare pull from his blog, but the bit I pulled gives a good sense of the information available. I really wish he still updated.