A story isn’t good if the reader can’t relate to the characters and isn’t given a reason to care. No matter how good your plot, no matter how amazing your world, the reader will not care if you don’t give them a reason to love your characters.There are really two steps to this, and you can’t skip on either of them.
Step One: Make Them Relatable!
Your character can be as interesting and quirky as you like, but they have to be relatable. If they aren’t, no one cares. If your character is perfect, then they’ll end up being resented by readers. The reader wants to see themselves in the characters, be it the main character, villain, or side characters.How do you make a character relatable?First, you have to have a good character. (More.)Once you have your character, you need to make sure they aren’t perfect, physically or otherwise. Make them clumsy, awkward, anxious. Maybe they talk too much, or freeze up when they’re around their crush. Maybe they’re loyal to a fault, and get angry too quickly. Maybe they cry easily, and always get themselves in trouble.Treat your character like they are a real person. Every person has faults, and quirks, and so should your character.This is also why you should make your characters diverse, in look, in personality, in background, in everything. It makes them more relatable to a larger group of people.
Step Two: Show Us Why We Should Care.
Step two is a big one, much bigger than just making them relatable. Before you jump deep into a plot, with lots of action and trouble, give us a reason to care.Give your characters a family, or a friend, and show their relationship, then take it away.Show us that they’re human, that they have something to be fighting for, something they’re missing.If your going to have two characters fight, first show us what they mean to each other and how they care, and then wreck us as they start to tear each other apart.Let your characters be vulnerable, and then hurt them. Let them open up, and then have them be torn apart because of it.Because if you want us to care, first you have to show us why. You can’t expect us to know how much a character cares for someone without showing us.This also adds depth to your story. It deepens it and makes it more meaningful and more impactful. By showing us what a character has, and then taking it away, we know what they are fighting for and why we should care. You can’t just tell us why they’re fighting, you have to show us.This is where the little moments come in handy.Everyone says every scene in your book has to involve the plot, but sometimes it’ll be more meaningful to let your character have a few moments where they’re not fighting, or upset, and they can just be the person they would be without all the conflict going on.In the small moments, you make us care. You show us exactly what it would be like if they didn’t have these high stakes, and the conflict is over. That gives us something to look forward to, and makes us care about the characters’ future.
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