Writing Characters Readers Love

You can have a well-developed plot, excellent prose, and amazing descriptive powers, but if your characters fall flat, the story won’t work. So, what does it take for readers to fall in love with a character? In this blog, I'm going to answer that question.

Falling in love is a beautiful thing. Having readers fall in love with a character can spawn a series twenty books deep. But getting a reader to fall for characters is almost as hard, if not harder, than finding your significant other in real life. It starts with discovering who the central character is meant to be for the story you’re telling. If you’re writing multiple POV characters, that can be more challenging but not impossible.

When I wrote my trilogy, A Time of Dragons, I had multiple point-of-view characters, but my main character was Rayna, a warrior with a secret stigma and a penchant for slaying dragons. I made a point of developing Rayna’s look, her attitude, her backstory, and her motives with great detail. I knew exactly who Rayna was so she sprung to life on the page and resonated with my readers. One of the things that draws readers to characters is making them believable, which is why I like to incorporate flaws. Rayna is described as a beautiful woman, but she harbors a flaw that alters her appearance by forcing her to wear an eyepatch.

The most endearing characters over the last decade are all flawed in some way. Tyrion Lannister is extremely intelligent but is vertically challenged. Hermione Grainger is witty and smart, but she’s a mud-blood. Regardless of their flaws, characters like Tyrion and Hermione have endearing qualities that have made them even more beloved than the rest of the characters in A Song of Ice and Fire and Harry Potter, respectively.  

That’s where the magic lays. It’s in spite of having shortcomings that these characters continue to fight. They believe in themselves or their mission, and thus, we do as well. How do we write characters in this way? This question has often been answered with “Make them bold, revered, and someone to emulate.” I disagree and the reason why comes from the world of wrestling where they’re finely tuned with character development.

For a long while, Charlotte Flair was positioned as a “babyface” or “good guy.” But it never really worked to win fans over, as Flair herself explained in an interview with the Daytona Beach News Journal: “On paper, I look like a bad guy. 5’10, athletic, blonde, accomplished. It’s very hard to connect to the audience. ‘Why should we cheer for her? She has everything!’ Or, ‘how do I relate to her? I don’t know what that’s like.’”

Flair equates herself to Apollo Creed in the Rocky Saga. Creed is at the top of his game with the best coaches and luxury facilities for training. Rocky, on the other hand, has to fight for everything he gets. And that is why Rocky is one of the most beloved characters of all time. He’s the ultimate underdog. People see themselves in Rocky and they root for him to overcome the obstacles in his way to make it to the top. When the character has to overcome a seemingly insurmountable challenge, it makes their victory that much sweeter.

Ultimately, writing characters readers love comes down to making them genuine. They should be well-rounded enough to leap off the page and into the hearts of readers.

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