How much reality is too much?

As a slush editor, I very much enjoy reading other magazines’ guidelines. Today I was looking over Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine guidelines. When I saw they had a list of common problems, I went straight there.  Much of it was standard, but there was one interesting perspective that caught my eye.

14. Characters Ain’t People:Characters are the shoes that readers want to slip on for a vicarious stroll through the clusterf***s of life that no real person would actually want to step into. Characters are relationships. They are the focal points of the push and pull of all the things that drive a story but they aren’t actually people. If you think of your character as a real person, it will be far more and far less than a character should be. If your character comes across as a whole person it will be too much. It will be too full and there will be no empty spaces left for the reader to imagine what it would be like to be the person the character is supposed to represent. If your character comes across as a real person, it will also be too small. If the reader is going to slip inside the character’s skin, that skin needs to be at least a bit oversized. The character needs to have that little extra that allows it to break from the ties that bind real people.

You know, I’m not certain I agree. I can’t see why you wouldn’t want your character to be as real as possible. The characters that have most stuck with me aren’t those that I identify with as much as those that seemed to be whole people, who seemed to be so real that I could imagine the way they’d approach any situation.

But it does seem that some readers like to put themselves in theplace of a character.  I remember reading once that part of the reason the Twilight series works so well is that Bella is hardly described. In other words, any young female reader could easily imagine herself as Bella.

Whenever, as a child, I became really entranced by a story, I envisioned myself hanging out with the charactes… not actually in place of someone like Anne McCaffrey’s Lessa or Tamora Pierce’s Alanna. There are all sorts of in-betweens, of course, that  involve identifying with or sympathizing with a character or her choices.

What do you think, as writers and/or as readers? Do you prefer characters to be real – or to be able to put yourself in the role of the character and live the story?

Also, this made me giggle:

Corollary 3.1: Dialog is inherently superior to prose. If you can replace three sentences of narrative with a single line of dialog, you are morally obligated to do so. In fact, if you don’t you will go to hell, directly to hell without passing go, and it will be one of those really bad levels of hell where all the fiction is written by accountants