MathiasCavanaugh.com

Good characters are like cats, stubborn and with  minds of their own.  You can try to poke them and prod them the way you want them to go, but they always go where they want to go whenever they want to go there.  You cannot make them be someone they are not.  They have a life of their own even though they exist only on paper.  And sometimes that is the frustrating thing for a writer to deal with.  We want to control our characters, but when we create one that is real enough to work for a story they just don’t do as they are told.