Aleena Mimetes wrote: One thing you need to consider is, if your reader is not in LOVE with your character, he won't care what happens in your book.
Love isn't necessary; fascination will suffice, as all the stories with anti-heroes show. But this point is a good one: in some circles in fandom the "Eight Deadly Words" are "I don't care what happens to these people!" (usually followed by the book at least figuratively hitting the wall).
Lycanis Mimetes wrote: I think I get what you're saying, kingjon, but I would say rather, that Bilbo was not very exciting. Hobbits are interesting creatures, and though at first I was thinking 'this guy's boring', I was still interested in their strange culture, etc until the adventure actually started.
So in summary, Bilbo was interesting, but at first wasn't very exciting at all. I hope that makes sense.
I think that my point was that some aspects of this discussion seemed to be assuming a perhaps implied requirement that "interesting" or "memorable" characters have to be (superficially) "exciting" (for some definition of "exciting") or "unique".
Another example to consider (not fantasy, and I'm not sure which side of the argument this would support): When I was young, I had bounced, hard, off of Understood Betsy, probably within the first chapter. It took my dad declaring it "family reading" and reading it to us (will or nil) at dinner for a week or two to get me to ingest it (so to speak), but thereafter it's one of my absolute favorite books.
And another: In The Magic of Recluce (the start of the thought-provoking series by L. E. Modessit), the protagonist and primary POV character, Lerris, is exiled from Recluce (which supposedly does this ---albeit with generous terms including training, equipment, and supplies---to everyone who fits into its completely-ordered society sufficiently badly, though it turns out later it's not that simple) because he finds order (in Modessit's cobha's sense) boring. This boredom isn't conveyed all that well, and mostly serves to make him less interesting, at least to start with.
The trouble with all these "character development" methods that require lots of facts about the characters is that a) they seem designed to appeal to writers whose idea of descriptive characterization is to insert "infodump" blocks of such facts, and b) facts about the character aren't directly relevant to whether the character is interesting (or memorable) to the reader; it's the portrayal that makes a character interesting and memorable. These methods are like "random plot" generating tools ... sometimes useful for some authors, sometimes if they're suffering from "writer's block", but not useful enough for me to recommend as a general tool for the writer's toolbox. The superficially-unique-character hook is one that some authors use to great effect (the mystery writer Dick Francis, I'm told, makes each protagonist have a different, usually odd, profession; many of the characters in the two books I've read by Nevil Shute are similarly interesting even superficially), but other authors make their characters perfectly ordinary with just as much success. (That Kipling quote I brought up in another thread seems apropos here too: "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays / And every single one of them is right!")
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So the more stuff I have to think about them, the more questions I have to ask myself about them (or ask them), the better! But there are others that go about it a different way, and that's partly because everyone thinks differently, and has different 'needs'.
Readers will get bored if everyone is the same.