100 Things You Should Know About Writing (Part 1)

13) How to Get a Reader to Care About Characters

Just as a quick recap, I want to remind everyone of the ground covered recently.

First, I explained that tension can't exist unless a reader cares about the outcome of the story. 

Since then, I've been going into some details of how to get the reader sucked in. First, I explained how to hook a reader to get him interested in the story. Next, I went into how one should release just enough information to keep the reader interested. After that, I explained character motivation as that's probably one of the most important aspects to a story that determines how characters act and react. It's also one of the things people get wrong most often. And in doing so, they disconnect the reader from the story. 

Today, I'm going to write about building a relationship between your reader and your main character. 

This is probably another thing you might not have thought of, but one of the easiest ways to get a reader to care about how the story ends is by making them care about what happens to the character.

An obvious way of doing this is by making a character likeable. If the reader likes the character, it's easier to go from liking to caring. Which is what you want. 

However, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to make all your characters likeable. On the contrary, some of the best characters in existance are out and out bad, but we can't wait to see what happens to them. 

I'm going to give you some advice on how to handle both types of characters. Soon, I'll dig a bit deeper into characterization. (Yes, we have miles deeper to go still.)

But today, I'm focusing on how to first connect the reader to a character, since that's the first step in creating a relationship between them.

Right now, I'm going to share the big secret of what makes the reader connect. Better yet, it's a secret that works for both likeable and unlikeable characters. It all comes down to one word: 

Relatability. 

Yes, no matter how you want to write a main character, if you want the reader to care, you need to show them they have something in common with the character. You need to make the reader connect to him/her emotionally.

Unfortunately, some writers represent their characters the wrong way. As a result, readers end up not liking the character, even when they're supposed to be likeable. Or, if the character's supposed to be unlikeable, they don't connect with him/her. Which kills your story because readers will have no tolerence for what the character does or says. So how do we make things work?

Let's look at likeable characters first. 

Writers get likeable characters disasterously wrong without realizing it. When they do, they take the character in completely the opposite direction, by making them anti-heroes, and that then fails because the characters no longer suits the story the writer wanted to tell. 

So if this is the case, what's wrong with your likeable character? 

He's strong, funny, affable, charming, witty, brave, just an all round wonderful guy. Yet no one likes him. 

Or she's beautiful, brave, generous, loving, funny, a little insecure, but always open to people and being supportive when they need her to be. NO ONE likes her. In fact, they call her a Mary Sue. 

How is it, then, that a likeable character becomes so unlikeable? 

Because no one relates to perfection. No reader knows what it's like to be perfect, because no reader is ever perfect. Which means that the reader will feel like he/she has nothing in common with the character. In addition, perfect characters have this annoying way of complaining about how perfect their life is.