The 4 Aspects of Engaging Characters - A Writing Excuses Dissection

Do you listen to Writing Excuses? If you do, good. If you don't: For Shame! That's right, I'm giving you the evil eye.

Writing Excuses is a great resource for writers, lovers of genre fiction and for many others of refined taste that only have 15 minutes and a busy schedule. I've listened to every episode of their nine seasons and recently Brandon and the team threw down a great tool for character development.

The basic premise is this: Your character not working? Do you and your readers not feel engaged with the character. Disinterested? Well, perhaps we need to look at how the character is structured and how they interact within the confines of the story.

Brandon suggests there are 3 aspects, or prongs (as he calls them) to creating an engaging character:
Sympathy - Are they a good person? Can you relate to the character, or sympathize? Frodo doesn't want to take on the burden of the ring, he feels inadequate for the task, and yet he does it anyway. We feel the impact of that decision and it pulls us into the story. (It also plays on Proactivity, but I think we mostly sympathize with this undertaking.)

Who runs this show?

Is it the puppet, or the puppeteer?

Or, in the case of who controls the varied twists and turns of a story: Is it the writer or the character?

The answer is always, to me, and most everyone else I hear from: the characters. So much so that a complaint of a character hijacking the story to do something entirely new and unanticipated is: commonplace.

However that's not how I feel about my stories...not yet, at least. Perhaps it comes with time?

I would never want a character to do something out of character (just for kicks) unless there was a good reason they had been forced that way, but...I don't know. So why don't I feel that way in my "gut" quite yet? Maybe it takes time to digest.

I like to think that I do a decent outline (I also thought this a while back, and then realized that I was horribly, disaster-laden...wrong, but I'm certain I'm better now...), and perhaps I get into the character's head well enough that what I "want" from the story and what the characters end up doing goes hand-in-hand.

Maybe.

Or maybe I'm just not cognizant of the character-upstaging phenomena quite yet.

For the writers out there, what is your experience?