I talked yesterday about listening as your book wants to go in a different direction than you want to take it. In novels you at least have characters that can take you in different directions. To do this you have to have characters you can trust.

One of my measures of a solid principle is when you see it come up in different creative endeavors. Todd Bright recently blogged about this idea in an entry in his Studio Bright blog titled Belief. He advises that you "must get into the head of our characters and ask many questions about what they would do. We must BELIEVE they are real personalities and connect with them. Without this connection, we will never connect with our audience."

What are the characters in your story? Are they real to you? Does the way in which they grow and change help you connect to your audience?

Even in a book about coding, I do think of my code examples as characters. They grow in a way that, I hope, the reader will be interested in following. I want the reader to be concerned with the future that my examples have.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.