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Characters are the beating heart of any story.
Without engaging characters, you can have all the special effects, car chases, blowups and whizzbangery you want, but no one will care.
For a story to truly interest a reader, we need to emotionally connect to its characters.
In particular, we need to connect to the protagonist.
We don't necessarily need to like them, but we do need to find them engaging.
Think of Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs for an illustration of this.
He is a murderer, and yet...as a reader, we still want to spend more time with him, for he intrigues us.
The same with Walter White (from Breaking Bad), Cersei Lannister (Game of Thrones), Vito and Michael Corleone (The Godfather), Count Dracula (Dracula), Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment) and every other ‘villain’ who has stood the test of time.
So what make these characters come alive?
What makes them work?
And how do we make our readers fall under the spell of regular, everyday characters?
More to the point for teachers, how can you take a character from one of your students' short stories and immediately make them ‘likeable’?
How can you get a reader to care about them?
In my ‘Fitzroy Method: Writing Course’, I'll go deeply into this topic (along with many other facets of the writing craft), but for now, I want to give you three tips your students can immediately implement in their work.
These tips will help a reader emotionally connect to characters and, as a result, care about what happens to them.
3 Tips for Creating Compelling Characters
Tip 1: Have Your Character Suffer an Injustice or Misfortune
This is one of the simplest ways of creating an empathetic bond between a reader and a character, and you see it everywhere in films and literature.
Effectively, you show your character suffering an injustice and bingo, the reader will emotionally bond with them.
That is why you don’t want to be a parent in children’s books/films.
It’s a dangerous occupation.
One or both parents are often either dead before the story starts or die during it, and that makes us feel sorry for our hero, something that bonds us to them.
Both of Harry Potter’s parents have been murdered.
Simba’s uncle kills his father in The Lion King.
Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games) is without a father, has an emotionally damaged mother, and needs to take care of her little sister Prim.
Elsa and Anna’s parents die in a shipwreck in Frozen.
Bambi’s mother is shot by a hunter in Bambi.
I could go on and on and on!
But any injustice or misfortune will work.
It could be racial discrimination, bullying, teasing – anything.
Just make life unfairly tough for your characters, and we will sympathise and bond with them.
Tip 2: Make Your Characters Hyper-Competent
Why do we like James Bond?
Now, I know recent films have made an effort to give Daniel Craig’s version of the man more emotional depth, but even so, that isn’t why people have been flocking to Bond films since Dr. No premiered on October 5, 1962.
Nope, we go to see Bond because he is just so competent.
Driving fast cars.
Flying helicopters.
Blowing things up.
Wooing women.
Playing cards.
It doesn’t matter what he does, he is just so good at it!
The same with the aforementioned Hannibal Lecter.
The guy is a murderer and should be despicable, but he is just so smart and good at psychoanalysing people.
So, no matter what our moral views tell us, we can’t help but be at least a little won over by him.
So if you show a character being particularly good at something, be it playing chess, building a house, making money – or whatever – that will be a powerful tool for engaging the reader.
Tip 3: Have Your Character Perform a Good Deed
Perhaps the most famous screenwriting book ever is called ‘Save the Cat’.
The idea is that if you make your protagonist save a cat (or metaphorical ‘cat’) that will help a reader bond with them.
We see a famous example of this in Disney’s 1992 version of Aladdin. In the film, after risking his life to steal a loaf of bread, Aladdin gives it to some starving children.
So, the guy might be a rascal and a thief, but after this noble deed, we are ready to root for him for the rest of the film.
Similarly, when Katniss volunteers as tribute in place of her sister Prim (The Hunger Games), we are ready to support her through thick and thin despite her somewhat surly personality.
Even I’ve used this tip in my novels.
For instance, in ‘The Slob’s Guide to the Perfect Job’, my hero Brad takes time in the first chapter to help a bumbling work colleague make a sale and then gives his colleague all of the credit.
So while Brad might be a slob, we can’t help but like him, at least a little bit (and for double points, he even demonstrated extreme competence in making the sale!).
Conclusion
Creating characters a reader will bond with is an art, and before we hurl them into an adventure, we need to ensure the reader cares about them in some way.
We need to create an emotional bond between our readers and characters (or at least our protagonist).
In my writing course, I will give you nine simple tips for doing this, but even by simply getting your students to use any of the three tips I’ve discussed in this article, their characters will come alive in ways we care about and bond with.
Happy writing,
Jeremy O’Carroll (Director of Training – Fitzroy Readers)
PSIf you would like to learn simple, implementable writing skills so you can help your students even more, consider joining me at myFitzroy Method: Writing Course on March 28 (via Zoom).Click here to find out more (and scroll down the page for all the details!).
PPSWant to check out how I put all of my writing ideas together?
If so, I'd like to gift you the audiobook version of my soon-to-be-released middle-grade fantasy novel,Dream Divers.
A tale about a 13-year-old boy who wins a scholarship to a mysterious school for 'advanced learning', it hurls readers headlong into a world of magic, dreams, hidden treasures, and deadly secrets.
Read by one the world’s most famous fantasy narrators, Michael Kramer (who narrated well-known series such as The Wheel of Time – now on Amazon Prime – and Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy), it’s something both students and teachers will love.
I’ve extended this offer to everyone on this Fitzroy Readers list, but this is the very last chance to get this audiobook for free.
So grab your copy, and let me know what you think.
To get your free audiobook of Dream Divers,click here.
