Ask any child what they remember most about a favourite book, and nine times out of ten they’ll tell you about a character. Not the plot, not the setting — the character. That one person (or creature, or magical being) who felt so real that the child half-expected to bump into them in the school corridor.
Creating characters like that is both the hardest and the most rewarding part of writing for children. Children are brilliantly unsentimental readers — they know immediately when a character feels false. So I try to base every character I write on someone or something real. A real child I’ve watched, a real feeling I’ve noticed, a real moment of courage or kindness that stuck in my memory.
The best children’s characters, in my experience, have three things: a big heart, a little flaw, and a moment in the story where they choose to do the right thing even when it’s hard. That’s the character children carry with them long after the last page.
