One of the curious facts about the emotional life of human beings is that some of the most memorable and influential people in our lives have never existed at all. Odysseus, Jane Eyre, Mrs. Dalloway, Holden Caulfield-these imaginary people have become part of the common cultural currency of humankind; further, they are the very foundation of the craft of fiction. We often hear people talk about the difference between character-driven stories and plot-driven stories, but the fact is that every narrative begins with its characters. In this lecture, we'll explore the fundamental differences between the imaginary characters of fiction and the people we know in real life. -James Hynes.

(King Arthur was an original part of his list as a non existent character but historical evident background and European researchers actually believe he is based on a real person not just an ordinary fictional character cooked up from someone's imagination that is why I removed him from the author list.)

See this chapter below

In this reference book of mine below in this reading list.

Characters in Fiction and Life
Writers love to talk about how complex and layered their characters are-and they often are but one major difference between fictional characters and real people is that characters are simpler.
A fictional character is constructed out of a few thousand words by a single writer, whereas a real person, even an uncomplicated one, is the product of millennia of heredity, centuries of culture, and a lifetime of experience. The best a fictional character can do is suggest a real person, not replicate one. They have only the illusion of complexity.
Indeed, their very simplicity is what makes fictional characters so vivid, because we can, by the end of a book or a play, see a fictional character whole in a way that we can't with most real people, even the ones we know intimately. But again, this wholeness is an illusion. In Hamlet, for example, we see only a few days in Hamlet's life, and even in larger-scale works, we never see as much of a character as we could a real person.
Another difference between fictional characters and real people is that characters are made up of only the most dramatic or the most representative moments of their lives. We all live through moments of drama that might make for good stories, but the vast majority of our lives is made up of an endless chain of ordinary moments. Such moments are of no interest to anyone else and sometimes not even to us. -James Hynes. (I don't agree with that sometimes boring ordinary moments are fun to actually write. Disney clearly contradicts this with Snow White and Aurora they are the most normal like people in their movies and if you don't like the Evil Queen's spice or Maleficient's spice they add to the story then you find their entire moving boring and thus also see Princess Snow White as boring and Princess Aurora as boring too. -Lumna10. Normaniforever4 and RoyalBunny7 I wrote that to yell at your own haters' hating on Snow White's and Aurora's Disney films. You're welcome.
When we write stories, however, we leave out all the ordinary, boring parts. (I disagree not all fictional authors do leave out boring ordinary moments. -Lumna10. I'm not one of them myself.) The story of Hamlet starts when he learns, from his father's ghost, that his father was murdered by his uncle and his mother so that his uncle could be king. The rest of the play is about how Hamlet deals with this information, and by the final scene, he's managed to kill, or cause to be killed, everyone he thinks has wronged him.
By contrast, a version of Hamlet that reproduced every single moment of his life would be both impractical and tedious.
The life of a real person goes on and on, with no scene breaks or dramatic structure, but in a narrative, we see only the significant moments.
Of course, some books try to reproduce the minute-by-minute progression of everyday life. The high-modernist novels Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway both take place over a single day-and not a particularly dramatic one in the lives of the main characters. But even with these seemingly all-inclusive narratives, we see only a few hours of the characters' lives, not a complete record of every moment from dawn to dusk.
We know the people in our lives by what they look like, what they say, what they do, and what other people tell us about them that is, by report. When we add this fourth way of knowing, we can expand our experience of real people beyond personal relationships to include all the real people we've ever heard about, from a friend of a friend to a movie star to a figure from history.

Both the people we know personally and those we know about by report are equally real, and because of that, people in both groups share a certain impenetrable mystery: We can't know what they're thinking. We have no direct access to the consciousness of other living people.

To understand this idea, consider the fleeting and digressive nature of your own inner life. Then, consider how impossible it would be to express that inner life to another person. Remember, too, that every other person in the world is experiencing the same kind of inner life, all the time. You quickly realize that each of us is alone in the universe inside our heads, surrounded by many other universes with which we can communicate only indirectly.

Thus, the most important difference between fictional characters and real people is that the author can, if he or she chooses, let us know exactly what a fictional character is thinking or feeling. We can know fictional characters in the way we know ourselves. In fiction, we have direct access to the consciousness of other human beings in a way we cannot in real life.

- James Hynes.
Qualifications and Paradoxes
We must note three significant qualifications about this unusual intimacy we share with fictional characters, starting with the fact that it is an illusion. It's not real intimacy because the character sharing his or her innermost thoughts with us isn't a real person. (Totally wrong in the case of the character of Clotee in the Dear America slave diary I annotated a month ago in this same book at the beginning you find out Clotee's story experience is pulled from the oral storytelling of Patricia C. McKissack her story's author's family retelling something about her great-great-great grandmother Lizzie Passmore who just like Clotee learnt to read and right as a slave despite it never being legal back then. -Lumna10.) The second qualification is that what feels like direct access to another consciousness isn't direct at all but is mediated through the talent, craft, and imagination of the writer.
Taken together, these two qualifications leave us with a paradox: We know fictional characters only by report, yet through the genius of certain authors, we feel as if we know some characters even better than we know those with whom we have intimate relationships.
Through the special relationship that fiction can have with its characters, we as readers can have the sort of intimacy with these fictional people that we otherwise have only with ourselves.
Even though your brother, for example, is real and infinitely more complex than such a character as Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, if you were asked at any given moment what your brother might be thinking, you could only guess. But you can know with absolute certainty what Clarissa Dalloway is thinking at any given point in the novel.
This paradox is at the core of the power of fiction to thrill and move us. In reading a book, all we really get are the imaginary thoughts of an imaginary person, but we feel as if we get something real and immediate, something we would never otherwise see: namely, the world through someone else's eyes, unmediated. -James Hynes.

A Contrary Statement example to James Hynes below about fictional characters not being like real characters.
Award-winning author Patricia C. McKissack says, "I was inspired to write "A Picture of Freedom" by the story I grew up hearing about my great-great-great grandmother, Lizzie Passmore, who had been a slave in Barbour County, Alabama. Although it was against the law, she had somehow learned to read and write. After the Civil War ended, she started teaching children in her home near Clayton, Alabama. Unfortunately that is all I know about this remarkable woman, but it gave me the foundation upon which I built Clotee's story.'" (I uploaded my personal annotations of this Dear America Book beside her amazing work of writing and I published it by the end of March here on Wattpad I started those annotations right around International woman's day and it was solely destined to become my International Women's Day though I did not know it was International Woman's day when I started my third or fourth Annotation chapters on March 8th until I went to a Checkers' Hockey Game here in Charlotte where they publicly announced that it was International Women's day.
To all my African family women and African American women here in the U. S. A a woman to celebrate among your people is no other than Patricia C. McKissack she is one of the most noteworthy unbiased authors I have ever seen to this date. She is a remarkable lady author. Her writing skills are on parr with that with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis with their famous series her short historical fiction is short yet just as strong as every book in those two men's famous story series.   Dear America A Picture Of Freedom is more than a story just for kids and it's more than just juvenile fiction it is historical fiction as its finest when done accurately. The other Dear America books hardly compare to Patricia C. McKissack's book she wrote. And above she is an excellent author who shows you exactly how to stop favortizing your main characters. There is zilch favortism in A Picture of Freedom, the author isn't bias. The main character Clotee she wrote is slightly bias at sometimes throughout her diary entries.

If you read the Diary Annotations already I challenge you to write Clotee's story from a bias author perspective in your own private time and you can see for yourself what I am to pick up on. And 2nd option for a writing prompt trying writing diary entries for Spicy our secondary main young female slave character is a lot more bias than Clotee is but Spicy is more made like a fictional character.-Lumna10

The Continuation of Intimacy.
The intimacy we share with fictional characters is only an illusion of intimacy, but it's such a powerful illusion that, at its best and most sublime, the book in our hands disappears, the voice of the author disappears, the world around us disappears, and we become fully engaged in the fictional world—at one with the character.

The third qualification is this: Even though all writers could put us in the heads of their characters, not all of them do. The amount of access a writer allows us to have to the mind of a character varies on a continuum from complete intimacy to no intimacy at all. Most fiction falls somewhere in the middle, where most of what we learn about a character is through action and dialogue, with occasional access to his or her thoughts.

Let's look at three examples of different points on the continuum of intimacy, begining with Mrs. Dalloway on the most intimate end. This novel gives us one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper middle-class woman living in London in the years after the end of World War 1.

Published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway is written in a style called stream of consciousness. With this technique, the narration keeps close to the consciousness of its characters, shifting among perceptions, thoughts, and memories effortlessly and with lightning speed in an attempt to evoke the quicksilver nature of human consciousness.
The novel relates the thoughts of Mrs. Dalloway at the very moment she thinks them in a way that's simply not possible for an outside observer to do in real life. Even if we knew Mrs. Dalloway and could ask what she was thinking, the mere act of translating her thoughts into speech would change what was happening; she would no longer be alone in her own mind but talking to another person.
Another remarkable book published in 1925 is F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. This book is narrated in the first person by Nick Carraway, but even though Nick speaks directly to the reader in his own voice, the narration here is less intimate than it is in Mrs. Dalloway.
We learn about Nick's history and his moral character through his narration, but we get the impression that he is holding certain things back.
Nick stands somewhere in the middle of the literary continuum between complete intimacy and no intimacy. We learn only what he chooses to tell us, which means that we learn no more about him than we might learn from him in real life.
A third example is The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett's classic detective story, published in 1930. Hammett's main character, the private detective Sam Spade, appears in every scene in the book, and we see the entire story from Spade's point of view.
We get detailed descriptions of Spade's appearance, gestures, and actions; we also get a great deal of dialogue, in much of which Spade isn't necessarily telling the truth. But what we never get in the novel is direct access to what Spade is thinking, and because The Maltese Falcon is written in the third person, Spade does not directly address us. Everything we know about Sam Spade we learn from observing him move and listening to him talk, the same way we would in real life.
At the end of the book, Spade must decide what do with Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the femme fatale who murdered his partner, but with whom Spade may or may not have fallen in love. It's an extreme situation, but Hammett doesn't plunge us into Spade's thoughts or allow his character to speak directly to us; instead, he lets us listen to a scene in which Spade thinks out loud about his feelings for Brigid and the choice he must make.
The scene is a vivid portrayal of a man wrestling with a bad situation. Although we don't have access to Spade's thoughts, we do have access to the dark world in which he lives. Hammett may not choose to show us every fleeting shift of Spade's consciousness, but he understands Spade and his moral universe every bit as deeply as Woolf understands Clarissa Dalloway's or as Fitzgerald understands Nick's.

The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald.
Aspects of the Novel by Forster
The Maltese Falcon by Hammet.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

Writing Prompt Suggested
Try to rewrite the scene of Mrs. Dalloway walking down Bond Street in the first-person style of The Great Gatsby or, perhaps, in the terse and more literal-minded approach of Dashiell Hammett. In other words, see if it's possible to evoke Mrs. Dalloway by having her tell us what she's thinking directly or by simply describing what she does or says as she moves through the scene. Conversely, see if it's possible to apply Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique to Sam Spade's hard-boiled world and still keep the scene tense, energetic, and suspenseful.