Readers have to love your characters. Full stop. Characters who feel lifelike and relatable will compel your readers to turn the pages and breathlessly await the sequels. Characters who are dull or flat will send your readers scurrying for another book.
And yet it’s so tricky to really nail a lifelike character and to translate your vision of them onto the page.
Here are some reasons why your characters might be falling flat.
It’s unclear what motivates them
By far the most common reason why a character feels flat on the page is that they don’t want anything. They don’t seem lifelike because there’s nothing beating in their heart.
Every character in your novel should want something and this should be either explicitly or implicitly apparent to the reader.
Once we know what a character wants we become invested in seeing whether they’ll get it and we’ll learn a lot about them from the manner in which they go after it. Their personality will be on full display.
So the first question you should ask yourself when one of your characters feels flat: Do I know what this character wants?
For further reading:
They’re reactive instead of active
That said, it’s not enough to just show a character who wants something. They also need to be going after that thing.
There shouldn’t be very many plot passengers in your novel. Everyone should have their own goals and agendas that they are pursuing as actively as possible.
Your protagonist especially needs to be working actively to shape their own destiny. If they are spending too much time reacting to choices made by the other characters, they’ll either feel dull or it will start to feel like someone else’s novel.
Make your characters active and you’re partway there to making them come alive.
For further reading:
They aren’t being challenged
Once you know what your characters want, it’s crucial to start throwing obstacles in their way. Just as in life, you don’t learn a lot about someone when things are breezy and easy. You learn what they’re really made of when they’re facing their biggest tests.
Two characters falling in love in a novel should have misunderstandings, false starts, and should have to work at it before they fall head over heels. A character trying to save the prince shouldn’t waltz right into the dragon’s lair without having to lift a finger.
Use conflict to show what your characters are made of. Give them difficult choices to make so we can see what they value. Put them in tough situations so we can see how they solve their problems.
Don’t make things easy.
For further reading:
You’re telling us how they feel instead of showing us
“Show don’t tell” is some way-overused writing advice, but there is one area where I think it nearly universally applies: a character’s emotions.
Everyone feels sad. Everyone feels angry. Everyone feels scared, frustrated, and excited.
Everyone expresses these feelings in different ways. The manner in which we channel those emotions and present them to the outside world is one of the most important factors that makes us all unique.
If a character feels flat, take a look at how you’re representing that character’s emotions. If you’re just telling us, “Joe feels sad,” it’s going to feel flat and dull. If you write, “Joe bowed his head and punched himself in the jaw…” that’s a little more vivid.
Let the reader infer what your characters are feeling from their unique actions. Show them reacting to their emotions rather than coming right out and telling us what they’re feeling.
For further reading:
Their gestures, voice, and interests aren’t unique
We all have writerly tics, and one of the most common ways they arise is when writers show different characters reacting to events in a very similar way.
All the characters will be giving pointed glances, or sighs, or their hearts will be beating out of their chests, or they’re all squealing. This can often extend to their voices, which can start to blend together and start sounding the same.
Instead: vary up the gestures. Make sure each character has their own individualized way of reacting to key events, their own nervous habits, their own tics. Make sure they sound different from one another.
Also make sure you know the things your various characters like and appreciate. What music do they listen to? Who do they admire? What paintings or posters do they have on their walls?
One of the best ways of making characters come alive is to show their quirky gestures, interests, and voices.
For further reading:
You’re not showing the full range of their personality
Sometimes writers are too nice to their characters and never show their bad sides. Other writers are too hard on their characters and dial up the negativity too far.
Over the course of the novel we should be seeing the full range of a major character’s personality. Everyone should have positive and negative qualities, even villains. Often what is a strength in one context can be a weakness in another, like someone who is determined but stubborn.
If a character feels one-note you might be being too nice or too mean to them. Broaden the range of their personality and show those appealing characteristics and flaws.
For further reading:
You just don’t know them well enough yet
Most characters you introduce will not just arrive fully-formed the first time they appear on the page. You may have to spend some time getting to know them. Sometimes this can take twenty five pages, fifty pages, or even a whole freaking draft.
Don’t put too much pressure on yourself if you can’t crack a certain character and can’t figure out what makes them tick. Just keep moving forward and just keep trying.
Sometimes it just takes a while to get to know someone.
There are exercises you can do to try to unlock their voice and mannerisms. Write journal entries from their perspective, rewrite scenes in the first person where they’re the protagonist, document a typical day in their life from the time they wake up in the morning to when they go to sleep, take an inventory of everything in their bedroom.
Just be patient. Keep trying. A character only has to be totally unlocked and unleashed in the final draft.
For further reading:
Have you had a character who felt flat? How did you breathe life into them? Tell us in the comments!
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Art: Juan Legua by Juan Gris
Great help. I was writing notes as I was going along for two of my more boring characters as I was reading this article.
But Nathan, I’ve just read a book published in 1884, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland, which proves that we’re ALL flat, because there is NO third dimension. It’s just an illusion.
But seriously, thanks for this very useful checklist.
Good article. When I was teaching writing the first chapter, first on my list of suggestions was give the main character a goal for the book on the first pages, make that goal emotionally important to them, and also make it important to the reader. Sadly, I read and toss away lots of books whose authors can’t figure out this simple fact.
Also, would you please put a link to your blog article in your emails. It’s a pain to find it among all the other links at the bottom.
For a long time, I’ve struggled with a character who is the second lead or romantic protagonist. He’s highly unusual which makes him harder to understand. But any character tends to be a product of their genetic/spiritual inheritance (generational gifts and curses) and their past, so delving into this history reveals a lot about a character. I’ve tended to reply too much on inspiration and not enough on working things out logically and methodically. But this has just resulted in a lot of re-working. I can see that using a checklist like Nathan has provided can be a reliable short cut.
The certainty for all characters is that all have a history of insecurities and misery along with a growing awareness of the truths that can set them free (of misery) and also those around them.
Interestingly enough, I was told by one book-seller that his current most popular book demographic was non-fiction philosophical and/or spiritual books. So the old tried and true aspect of creating a character who learns valuable life lessons along the way can be appreciated by the reader as a graphic way of learning how to walk through life on thorns or rose petals.
Perhaps I don’t understand what you mean by that your character should not be reactive, but you seem to be saying that a character should always be in control of their fate.
In the real world, which is what I try to write about, that is not possible and would mean not writing about much of life. When my main character is thrown into a war he never wanted nor asked for but has no choice but to take part in, he is reactive. It is that simple, and I’m not going to decide not to write his story because of that.
They don’t need to be in control of their fate and it’s good if there are forces outside of their control, but they do need to be *doing* something about things they want.
Well, they have to do something. There I certainly agree, but what if what they want is not what they want? In any war, is what someone does often what they want to do (short of staying alive and keeping their comrades alive)? And what if, as is not uncommon in a coming of age story, they don’t even know at the start exactly what they want?
I look for example at Wolf Hall. Much of what the main character did in that was not particularly what he wanted to do. And the goals he reached were not the ones he had at the start of the novel, and it wasn’t even coming of age.
This writing gig is a complicated business to figure out.
Being able to edit is good. What if what they must do is not what they want?