Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.

Barnard’s advice warns fiction writers against mistaking mere plot-function “puppets” for fully imagined characters. The metaphor suggests that if an author has not internally apprehended a character as a living, psychologically coherent person—complete with motives, contradictions, and independent agency—then the act of writing cannot magically supply that depth. “Ink and paper” stand for technique and surface description; without genuine imaginative conviction, the result remains wooden. The quote thus champions character realism as an inward discipline: believable people on the page begin as vivid realities in the writer’s mind, not as manipulable devices to move a story along.