Numbing Faceless Nameless Lifeless Abstraction

I'm going to try to be shorter winded today:)

"You are a person, not a number. You don't see digits in the mirror, you see a face. And you don't see a crowd. You see an individual.  So you and I relate more powerfully to the reality of a single person than to the numbing faceless nameless lifeless abstraction of numbers*."  - Paul Slovic, as taken from Paulo Coelho's Blog

This is the hardest part for me as a writer: essentially creating a character who is a dimensional person.  Often I need a character to fill a role in a plot, and so I'll give them a personality that fits what choices they'll make or who they will influence, etc. But I don't want them to turn out like this:

 I don't even remember this character's name - and, neither does the person who uploaded the pic to the web (the url includes her as "transformer's 3 girl.") Really, that is my point. Now, I didn't see the second movie, I skipped it, but in the 3rd movie I saw no reason why the main character was in love with her at all, other than the fact that she was hot and wanted to sleep with him: what she looked like and what she would do for him were the only motivations for his "love," and for her being in the movie at all, really.  "Numbing faceless nameless lifeless abstraction."

Had I a grave, I would roll over in it if a character I created came out like this: dry, dimensionless, unreal. Of course, the characters I would create/have created indeed are NOT real and never will be, nor were they ever.  However in order for the story to take on meaning beyond what I could write in an essay, the people in it have to be realistic as persons.  Otherwise, it's just a soapbox rant or a text book.

If you and I think about all of the stories that meant something to our lives, whether they be from our childhood or later, we would always admit that the ones that are the most powerful are the ones with "real" people in them. Characters we believe could actually exist and who are people who we can relate to as incommunicable** beings.

That is my fear, but also my inspiration to search for and convey unique, irrepeatable, individual human persons in a story that I write. So that people of all ages and all times can know him and befriend him, like this immortal character:

*I love that last bit. It's almost an excessive description, but as it causes the emphasis that was intended which no sole word could convey, it seems perfect. The Jews would think so too, with their "holy holy holy...." but that's another train of thought.

**Incommunicable is a word used in philosophy to describe the uniqueness of each human person: essentially how "no one can take your place" no matter their identical qualities and aspects.