Let your key skill of imagination run riot. Draw up detailed biographies for your characters. Create Pinterest boards using pictures that suggest the people and places involved in your work in progress. Interview your hero and/or heroine in your head. Live with your characters until you’re as close to them as you are to your own family.
If you’re hoping to get your work published, find out exactly what your potential readers want, and give it to them. Nothing less (or more) will do. Writing for profit doesn’t work in the same way as producing meals for children. You can’t give them what you want to create and say; ‘you’ll have this, and like it.’ or, ‘how can you say you don’t like it, if you’ve never tried?’
Always work toward giving your readers the perfect read. Make them care about your characters, and what happens to them. Grab them with the first sentence on Page One, and don’t let go. Your audience is hungry for action, whether it’s romance or drama. They want to escape from their everyday lives into a different reality. Create heroes and heroines for them, with whom they can relate. Give those characters aspirations, a job to do and a journey to complete during the course of your book, whether it’s a physical one or an emotional transformation. Let your characters grow and change through the course of your book. Above all, make them complex and multi-dimensional.