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But when you choose characters make sure they fit into your story as well. Come up with an ending, at least temporarily, and place this character in it. Will it work? Does it make sense? These are the questions a writer should ask every time a new character is brought into the story. A Character shouldn’t be forced into action to help the main plot or theme. They should act naturally, and in doing so a writer creates a level of realism.
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. . .

Speaking about the idea of researching notions of the craft of writing and about the lives of various writers, the most recent KICK IN THE PANTS from David Farland, "Timeless Fiction," talks about how what is the most timeless was written, at the time, to be successful then and there. (Among other points. I don't know how to link to his newsletter.)

Then, Wharton, in her book on fiction writing (per Jacob Malewicz, from the link above) gives--

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[...]a brief overview of the birth of modern fiction.[...]Wharton writes that in order to be a successful writer an artist should study the history of art. The fear of being unoriginal and the fear of not writing enough lead to stories that, though possibly original, feel forced.[...]Instead of focusing on making a story original try to make believable characters and situations.
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A major thing about studying writers I love, for me, is that it sometimes emboldens me to think that it is OK for me to be who and what I am--and maybe I can write, ANYWAY.

For example, yeah, I love Hodgson Burnett's stuff. Yet Hodgson Burnett is said absolutely never to have read newspapers. Does that mean I should never read newspapers? (No, but if I didn't, the fact that she didn't either might encourage me to think that was OK, right?)

But, of course, Both Frances Hodgson Burnett and Harper Lee (who I also love) just loved to read stories. Constantly. And, Hodgson Burnett constantly told and wrote stories. (And just about any manuscript that was ever pidgeonholed by Hodgson Burnett ended up being brought back out and sussed up and then published.) Well, I will never be anything like either one of these writers in that regard. Oi! In fact, I don't even LIKE fiction, usually! (However when I DO like it, I love it.) Would this trait make it less likely for me to be write successful fiction, I worry? ---- Well, maybe.

But, then I studied up on the life of another of my all-time-favorite writers, four of whose novels I'd read multiple times each when I was in grammar school and junior high: Mark Twain.

Michael Sheldon's 2010 biography MARK TWAIN: MAN IN WHITE, about Twain's final few years of international celebrity [unless I picked up the following factoid from Kaplan's biography of Twain, that I've read recently, too) reveals that Twain himself didn't like to read fiction very often but preferred history. In fact, Twain came late to writing fiction (well, his earlier travel writing and memoir pieces were in good measure fiction, lol) and his first novel, THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, was in a humorous subgenre that had been popularized by yet another writer in a best seller that preceded it about some Dennis-the-Menace type character. So, apparently, Twain had read this or a similar book and thought he could write something as good (similar to the story told by Dan Brown about how Brown had read a thriller and said to himself, "Hey, /I/ could do better than this!").

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Yet, as for structure, etc., it is said that, in certain regards, Twain was sloppy: he struggled with aspects of viewpoint in his third-person narration in TOM SAWYER (a book, incidentally, based on himself) and fixed the problem somewhat with his first-person narration in THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (which, incidentally, was based on the son of the town drunkard of Hannibal); so, there are all sorts of quibbles that theorists of literature could express with regard to Twain's fiction. But, I loved it, as a kid. It communicates a lot about people and a time and also doesn't fail to entertain. Thus it is a success, in my book.

Then the reviewer in THE NEW YORKER of the 2004 biography of Harper Lee basically somewhat denigrates Lee's fiction skills in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. (For example, Lee was said to have slipped between an adult narrator and a child narrator with out warning--and there are dangling modifying phrases in it (or praps it was that Lee's pronouns in places are difficult to match with their antecedents, I can't remember which, now)--and a number of other complaints. Again, maybe so. It was Lee's first (and only) novel, after all. But loads of people loved it--were enthralled and instructed by it. And I also read it multiple times and loved it as a child.)

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One commonality I AM picking up about my tastes, however, IS----(well, the epigraph I wrote for this post). And, in fact, both TOM SAWYER and MOCKINGBIRD are largely autobiographical--and Hodgson Burnett's THE SECRET GARDEN, that I also loved so much, is set in the location of a particular English manor that Hodgson Burnett knew well (one with 17 guest bedrooms that she had leased year after year and at which she had found the key to an walled garden and herself had replanted it)--and the plot has to do with sort of a psychological redemption, something the author herself believed herself to have recently experienced at the time she wrote it.

Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) was a lifetime "writer" of fiction but never got published in that area ('cept in later life a novel that didn't go very far and an odd short story or two). So interesting! So--he became a journalist.

Kaplan says that Steffens is so abstract that his fiction suffers. Yet, he was great at setting forth ideas in his pieces of investigative journalism (called at the time muckraking, of course). He eventually left "reformism" behind and became a socialist (even a quasi Communist), and he traveled to visit with players in the Mexican and Russian revolutions and just about knew "anybody," everywhere in the world. Steffens's 1931 autobiography (which I'd read some years ago) was a huge best seller.

When Steffens moved from being a reporter with the NY EVE POST to being the ed/r of the NY COMMERCIAL ADVERTISER, he switched from the staid journalistic standard of disallowing suggestions of writer's opinion or feeling or of individual voice/"literary-ness" of the POST to what Steffens set up to be the exact opposite of this, at the ADVERTISER, hiring young men/women from college who were wannabe (fiction) writers (like Steffens).

He would have his cub reporters talk their stories out and then would tell them "OK, write it like that"--that is, to bring out the heart of what they were getting at, written essentially in the manner of speech.