Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/37235
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

At the time of writing this question there are 5337 Harry Potter questions on SciFi and a further 165 on Movies. Many of these questions drill right into the character's motivations and emotions such as [Why would Snape set his office password to 'Dumbledore'?](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/146641/why-would-snape-set-his-office-password-to-dumbledore), [Why did the Minister of Magic execute Dumbledore's will?](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/182468/why-did-the-minister-of-magic-execute-dumbledores-will), and [Why did Dumbledore hire Lockhart?](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/40756/why-did-dumbledore-hire-lockhart).

I don't mean to suggest that JKR isn't a talented author. Literary critiques aside she's made millions of pounds from her writing. But I cannot believe that she anticipated every single thought, motivation, and emotion each of her characters felt during the seven books and associated works. Not to the level of detail to stand up to the scrutiny of millions of readers!

SciFi has thousands of questions which which ask about character motivation and why characters did particular things and people (with a LOT of reputation) can create plausible, reasonable, arguments to justify their actions.

There seems to be some kind of physiological trick here which allows readers to interpolate the missing information from what's there...

Remembering that at the end of the day Dumbledore, Picard, Gandalf, and Yoda are fictional characters and assuming that their creators cannot possibly delve into every single permutation and action how do authors create characters which can stand up to this sort of scrutiny?

**In short, how does an author shift a character in the reader's perception from being a creation to a person in their own right?**

Original score: 26