Characters who come alive...

The characters in a book are born in the imagination of the the author. They have to be coaxed out of this comfortable home and written into a book, where they wait in the hope of a reader opening their book and setting them free into the imagination of the reader, where they'll live for as long as you'll let them.

Once a story is written down it takes on a life of it's own - literature classes can study and analyse a story and find all sorts of meanings, but can they really be sure that that was what the author meant when they wrote the story...? When we read a story we fit it around our own experience and knowledge, so every reader will have their own perception of the characters and which way they should go within their plot.