One struggle that many writers have was neatly summed up by a respondent to the Aliventures survey, who wanted to know about "How to make the reader care about your characters."
Your characters don't need to be nice or particularly likeable. They might be the sort of person who you'd steer well clear of at a party. They should, however, be characters that the reader can care about – by which I mean the reader should want to keep reading to find out what happens to them.
You can probably think of characters in books, on TV, or in films who you desperately cared about. You really wanted them to find love, or to overcome the flaws that were holding them back, or to win the approval they were seeking, or at least survive the story.
That's how you want readers to feel about your main cast of characters.
There are quite a few different ways to help readers care about your characters, including:
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Writing about characters who they can fairly easily identify with. Maybe you're writing Young Adult fiction, for instance – that means having a young protagonist. Your characters don't have to be superficially similar to the reader (perhaps they're of a different race or religion) but they'll ideally have something in common with your readers – even if that's just something like a similar way of seeing the world.
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Giving your characters real problems, right from the start. It's hard to care about a character who's just going about their day, problem-free. The sooner you can introduce a problem (or at least a hint of one), the better.
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Having something bad happen to your characters. (We covered this in the blog post Making Bad Things Happen to
Good Characters.) If your character is pursued, attacked, heartbroken, in pain, or otherwise suffering, we're more likely to care about them.
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Creating a character with an unusual voice or perspective. While this may not be enough in itself to get us to care about the character, it'll often keep us reading so we get to know them better.
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Showing an obvious lack or loss in your character's life. Maybe your stoic, hard-drinking detective lives alone ... and has photos of his estranged young children on the wall. Perhaps your giddy twenty-something protagonist seems to be happy with her easy going lifestyle and her low paying job ... but she obsessively looks at her successful friends' achievements on LinkedIn. If we can see that a character is missing something that would
make them happy and fulfilled, we'll start to care about them ... and we'll want to keep reading to find out if they achieve it.
Ultimately, readers want interesting, multi-faceted characters who have both goals and problems and who strive to achieve things (even if – perhaps especially if – they make mistakes along the way). There's no "instant" way to make readers care about your characters, but by using all the things we've talked about in this series and by trying out some of the ideas above, you should be able to create characters that readers really want to find out more
about.
