How to Write Great Characters in Your Book

​Today I’m going to be discussing what makes a great character and how to write them. By “great character” in this context, I’m referring to a specific type of character: one that readers want to invest in, empathize with, spend more time with, and read more of.
 
(If you’d like to view this post in video format, click here. It’s part of our “Advice from an Editor” series on YouTube.)

​With this definition, you don’t necessarily want all of your characters to be great characters—in fact, in certain situations, you might purposefully not make a character a great character. For example, if you’re in a very tense scene, and emotional stuff is going on, and the porter opens the door and says, “Yes, ma’am,” and you go through . . . That porter shouldn’t be a great character, if you never see him otherwise in the book, because if the reader’s suddenly distracted with “What a great character; I want to spend more time with the porter,” then they’re not going to be paying attention to whatever else is going on.
 
There are also specific cases where a writer might choose to have a more major character not be a great character because they don’t want the reader to pay attention to them or to empathize with them. We see this most commonly when it comes to Big Bads. Saruman is a great character, but Sauron is not. Sauron—in the Lord of the Rings trilogy; I’m not talking about The Silmarillion or the histories—is just in the background, and he’s just straight evil. He’s your devil-type villain, and devil-type villains, who are just flat evil, don’t tend to be very interesting. (On which note, if you would like to see a video / read a blog post dedicated to talking about different types of villains and how to use them, please leave a comment below telling me.) But the point here is, Tolkien didn’t want us focusing on Sauron—that wasn’t the point of the story. And so he didn’t give any great, interesting details about Sauron; he left him in the background. And that’s okay. However, unless you have a specific reason to not want attention paid to a character, for the most part, your protagonist, your villain, and your side characters should preferably all be great characters.
 
There is, of course, a lot of advice out there on how to make a great character. And they usually form lists like “Your character should be this; your character should be that.” This is completely valid, but for today’s post, I wanted to come at it from a different angle, which is: What is the function of the character within the story? Why do we even want a great character? What’s the purpose?
 
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of answers to this, but I am going to be talking about two. These are the two biggest, most “umbrella” concerns from which almost everything else follows. They are:
 
1. Characters connect with the reader, and
 
2. Characters drive the plot.
 
Let’s start with characters connecting to the reader. I talked about this topic a little bit in my Stakes video and blog posts. One of the major ways to make your reader invest and care about what’s going on is to get them to invest in and care about your protagonist, or a side character. How you do this is by building empathy with the character. But connecting with the character goes beyond that, because we’re not just talking here about protagonists—we’re also talking about antagonists. Just as you want your reader to connect with, understand, and empathize with your protagonist, so that they want your protagonist to win, so also you want your reader to connect with and understand and be motivated regarding your antagonist—to want your antagonist to lose or to reform or to be redeemed . . . or, in some cases, for the other characters to simply understand them. These are all fantastic traits, so the question is: What makes readers connect with characters?
 
Well, what makes humans empathize and connect with other things? What do we most empathize with? We most empathize with other humans. Or, more broadly, with other people. We don’t empathize greatly with tables and chairs, unless tables and chairs are personified or made more human. This holds true regardless of whether your protagonist is human or (if you’re writing sci-fi, fantasy, or a kids’ book) an animal or an alien or maybe even a personified table and chair. The key here is: Whatever your protagonist is, make them as human as possible. Make them a wonderfully multifaceted, multidimensional creature who has good traits and bad traits, who is neither perfectly good nor perfectly evil, who has flaws but also strengths, who has a complex personality and unique points. . . . Now, keep in mind that you need to portray almost all of those in one or two sentences when you introduce your character. Have fun with that.
 
I’m kidding—I will actually give some helpful advice here, which is: Don’t write the boring bits. Look at what caricaturists and impressionists do. If you have a caricaturist drawing a picture of a politician who happens to have a big nose, the caricaturist will draw basically bland lines and then add an enormous nose. And the impressionist, who is doing a celebrity impression of a person who hunches a little, puts their arms a little forward, and says “Um” a little more than average—that impressionist will put their shoulders forward a lot, and their hands out a lot, and will say “Um, um, um” almost every other sentence. I’m not recommending that you write caricatures as characters. What I’m saying is, what the caricaturist and the impressionist are doing here is bringing out the most interesting, noticeable factors.
 
Imagine for a moment that, as fairly often happens, you’re trying to say, “Oh, that guy; I don’t know his name. He’s, uh, he’s maybe middle-aged, he’s five-foot-nine, he’s brown-haired, average weight, he has an ordinary-shaped chin . . .” No one’s going to know whom you’re talking about. No one’s going to know who that is from that description. But if you say, “Yeah, he was the guy with the really crooked teeth,” unless you happen to live in a colony full of people with really crooked teeth, the person you’re talking to will probably know immediately whom you mean. Of course, this doesn’t just have to do with physical characteristics. This also has to do with how people speak: if they have a distinctive tic, if they use very complex syntax, if they use long words, if they have an accent. Don’t be offensive, but don’t be politically correct; don’t be afraid in your book to say “the man with the crooked teeth” or “the fat man” or “the man with the limp” as long as that is unusual within your universe.
 
Do this also for other aspects. Do it for personality and for speech, and do it for motivation. Let me give you an example of a real historical character and let’s see how long it takes you to know whom I’m talking about. He’s a man who wore a stovepipe hat. You probably already know, but let’s draw his character a little more. He was a tall white man with a serious face despite his love of cracking jokes. He wore a somber, long black coat and a stovepipe hat. And he was an extremely religious man. He wasn’t so sure at first whether people of different races were in fact intellectually and physically equal, but he believed that since God had saved all human beings, it was his duty and the duty of all Christians to free the slaves and allow them to live as equals. And over time he came to understand that people of different races really were equals, and so he did his best to unite the nation in which he lived, and to do so in friendship and love and empathy. And he led his nation successfully through a war to carry this point.
 
I’m talking, of course, about Abraham Lincoln. And this brings me to the second half of the function of characters. And that’s to drive the plot.
 
A man who wears a stovepipe hat is not an interesting character. A man who wears a stovepipe hat, has a serious face but loves to tell jokes, and is absolutely lit with a flame of motivation to free the people who have been enslaved in his nation no matter what it takes—that’s a fantastic character. And that sure drives the plot, as the American Civil War demonstrated. Your characters should do the same, and not just your protagonist. In the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln wasn’t the only one acting. We had generals on both sides with giant personalities who were all doing (and, in the case of McClellan, failing to do) amazing things. Working together in some ways that were really convenient and some ways that were overly inconvenient, that were really impressive or really detrimental. And we had some really unpredictable things. We had some people who were massively antagonistic toward the enemy. But we had some who were enormous friends. Abraham Lincoln himself, after the war was over, went to the house of General Pickens, a Southern general, and Pickens’ wife came to the door and said, “Oh, the president of the United States” probably with all the bitterness you’d expect. And Abraham Lincoln replied, “No, Pickens’ friend.” Because they were before the war great friends. And this is not the obvious thing to happen, but isn’t it a great character moment? And it’s in character, too.
 
But I’ve become a bit distracted here. The point of this post is not a history lesson, however interesting that might be. The point is: Your protagonist is not the only one with motivations. The villain should have motivations and should interfere with the protagonist’s plans. The side characters should have their own motivations and may become distracted or may just have different ideas of how to solve the problem. And this interaction, tied with the interesting descriptions and different presentations of the characters, personalities and voice and manner of speaking, manner of dressing and manner of holding themselves and walking and physical traits, all of these things together are what make fantastic characters the reader wants to stay with and learn more about.
 
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Do you have any other advice, comments, or questions about writing great characters? Leave them in the comments!
 
For more writing tips, check out our Advice from an Editor YouTube series, or this set of blog posts.

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Deborah J. Natelson

​​Deborah lives with a fluffy member of fauna named Flora and two pretty black kitties. She is the author of Bargaining Power, a smart, twisty fantasy thriller; The Midnight Files, a serialized, action-packed dark fantasy on Kindle Vella; and various other books. Her author website is www.deborahjnatelson.com.