How To Write Compelling Characters Who Stay With Readers
Understanding how to write compelling characters is essential to great storytelling. Whether you primarily focus on the plot or protagonist in your novel, strong characterization separates the good novels from the great ones and can be the difference in your sales.
Audiences look for the empathetic characters in movies, the heroes they can relate to, and protagonists that resonate with their own hopes and dreams. Educating yourself on how to write compelling characters can set you apart in your specific genre. In this article, I teach you how to write compelling characters to add layers of depth to your story.
Your plot matters to the tension you want to create. Your subplots matter. But it’s your characterization that holds it all together.
Let’s have a conversation about creating memorable characters and why they matter.
What makes a fictional character compelling?
What truly makes a fictional character compelling is communicating their deeply held desires to your reader, then revealing the plot through this lens. People in real life each have specific desires they work toward, whether they realize it or not. Consider the following inner desires as you consider how to write compelling characters. Desire to:
Fulfill personal potential
Work toward establishing self as a respected individual
Gain emotional stability with a partner
Find any job that will pay the bills
Find sustenance for daily needs
If you paid close attention, you noticed that each desire is drawn from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In this hierarchy, Maslow states that the following needs are pursued in ascending order:
Self-actualization
Esteem
Love and belonging
Safety needs
Physiological needs
Writing compelling characters usually involves correlating a desire with a need and then layering backstory in to add nuance. For example, consider Katniss Everdeen in the bestseller, The Hunger Games.
Katniss begins the trilogy at the bottom of the pyramid scheme, looking for food and trying to stay alive. However, Suzanne Collins pairs this physiological need with Katniss’s character: she desires to provide for her family and does so via hunting wild game.
To be compelling, your character’s life should feel as believable as possible. Once you decide on your character’s desire, look deeper. Every individual has a need/s that belong somewhere in Maslow’s hierarchy. To help establish believability, ask the following:
Where does your protagonist fit into this structure?
How can this knowledge help you add believability and humanity to this character?
But there has to be more to a compelling character than just believability, right? The most believable characters would be called on-the-nose, after all. So how do you balance being believable with intrigue? That’s up next.
How do you write a powerful character?
Writing a powerful character involves creating one who’s arc feels like it could be a real life story. The classic novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, stands as a prime example of how to do so.
Harper Lee integrates just enough relatable details to make her characters feel like they could be your friends or neighbors. However, she only adds details that support the theme of her story. Rather than walk her readers through every detail of her Scout’s, her protagonist, life, she pulls the details that truly matter.
In this way, Scout feels like a real life little girl. Her empathy and compassion grows as she does, and her desire to understand the world around her makes her a uniquely interesting character.
She regularly experiences the emotions coming-of-age brings, sees her brother through the moods of adolescence, and at a young age, witnesses the ugliness of racism. She learns obedience to her father and how to stand brave in the face of danger.
The character of Scout is so powerful because of her age paired with her profound outlook on life. As she works to find friendship and build a sense of connection in her community, she learns what it means to love freely and risk deeply.
In a way, this novel pairs the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy with the pinnacle—self-actualization.
While Scout’s life is fiction, the details integrated in every chapter make it feel like a real life story. The young boy she makes friends with, the many lessons the kids learn, and the striking last page acts as a case study in creating characters that compel. Learning how to write compelling characters often starts with reading the classic examples that still stand the test of time.
What are the three general rules for writing characters?
Writing is a subjective business, but when learning how to write compelling characters, note how these three specific tips work together: reveal your characters’ goals, humanity, and heroism.
Reveal Their Goals
As stated above, every individual possesses some type of goal. Whether this goal is to make it through another day of high school, provide for elderly parents, or one day qualify for the Olympics, everyone has goals.
Some goals may feel larger than life, such as Frodo choosing to take the ring to Mordor. Other goals may feel small, such as Ron attempting to ask someone to the Yule Ball.
Whatever goal fits your character, make sure to reveal it early on so your reader knows what they are rooting for.
Reveal Their Humanity
Your second step in learning how to write compelling characters is simple: showcase the humanity in your character before you get too far into your draft. To continue with the above examples, Frodo views himself as just a hobbit, a small human in a large world. He is brave, but he is also afraid of the dangers ahead.
Ron feels desperate to ask a girl out before there are none left to ask. The pressure of the ball mounts until he finally forces himself to speak up. As a rule of thumb, the earlier you can reveal the humanity in your character, the better.
Reveal Their Heroism
When crafting characters, remember that humanity without heroism lacks inspiration, while heroism without humanity usually falls flat. What makes the characters of Frodo, Ron, and Katniss so inspiring (granted, each in very different ways), is that each author tied humanity into the character’s heroic act.
Frodo feels physically insignificant. Ron must fight his personal insecurities of being a Weasley. Katniss just wants to protect her sister.
Each character’s heroism would not hold the weight it does without their humanity cast as a backdrop. Learning how to write compelling characters heavily relies on layering in the appropriate backstory.
How do you write a good complex character?
Writing a complex character frequently comes down to the details of your scenes more than focusing on the end goal of your plot. Complexity shows in small interactions, choices, and habits.
Complexity as external circumstances.
Complexity is the sum of many moving parts. Something that compels is something that forces these moving pieces to come into alignment and work together to push toward a specific goal.
A cardinal rule for writing a good complex character is to make them conflicted. For instance, Katniss wants to provide for her family by hunting for game in District 12. However, when her sister is chosen at the Reaping, she volunteers to take her place.
Collins reveals Katniss’s inner conflict through her dialogue with Gale. She asks him to take care of her family, because by taking her sister’s place, she no longer can. While this is not an overt theme compared to her public action of volunteering, this inner conflict creates complexity in her character and therefore, the story.
Complexity as internal struggle.
A good complex character can also embody opposing desires, as is often true of antiheroes and villains. What often makes a great villain is their desire to do something good conjoined with their commitment to doing so regardless of the means.
Another key factor of heroes is the desire to perform an outward task but an inner aversion to committing the act itself. Overcoming this aversion is the definition of bravery.
Be sure to reveal your character’s inner struggle in parts. Layer their difficulties into various scenes and refuse to make it easy on yourself by telling, rather than showing, their struggles with a large information dump.
Examples of how to write compelling characters.
Complex characteristics come to light when you reveal the details of a character’s life. Film is a great medium for learning how to write complex characters.
Comedic Film
Do you remember the old Freaky Friday film about how a single mom and her daughter switch bodies? Living each other’s lives for a short time period shows them the complexities of each other’s daily lives. Most of these complexities show in the details of various scenes: peer pressure for a band audition, stress in romantic relationships, and complicated family dynamics.
Fairy Tales
Film teaches through animated films as well. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast reveals Belle’s interests. Her deep love for learning tied with her devotion to her father creates a juxtaposition in her character: her desire to read and adventure goes against the social norms for young women in her day. However, her selfless care for those she loves is an inspiration to those around her.
A complex character doesn’t need to possess opposing characteristics or literally swap bodies to compel readers. Everyone is complex because no individual is exactly the same. For writers, the key is to draw out these complexities and highlight them in your story.
Embrace the complexity and start writing today.
Creating a deeply nuanced character can feel overwhelming, so it’s vital to remember that all of fiction is based in some form of reality. If you’re unsure where to find inspiration, look at your life. What details about your friends and family often go unnoticed? How can you use these details to inspire the small habits in your own characters?
Sometimes, taking a few hour break is needed. Try finding empathetic characters in movies to inspire your creativity as you dream up your own characters. Sometimes, your writing journey may call for a one-on-one coaching session as you wade through a difficult scene or character arc. Personalized help can work wonders and help you overcome blocks that have held you back for days, weeks, and even months.
At other times, you may need to simply sit down at your desk and start writing. As the saying saying goes, writers write. Wherever you find yourself in your writing journey, now you know how to write compelling characters. I’m eager to hear what you come up with!
