Five Things Every Character Needs
To Compel the Reader
What does everybody need?
Somebody, sometimes?
Somebody to love?
A bosom for a pillow?
All of the above, in fact. There’s no reason all three songs can’t be right. People need more than one thing: That’s the point. People need all kinds of things. Characters are like people—fictional people. They need all kinds of things, too, but instead of like food and water and shelter they need a plot, and a basic physical description, and a detailed backstory. Characters: They’re just like us.
Today’s Shelf Life will not be very good because I’m brain dead at the end of sixteen straight working days which is unusual for me as an office dweller. This is as opposed to the brain deadness I have on an ordinary day. It’s worse somehow. But in any case today’s Shelf Life is about five things a good character needs to have to be lovable, memorable, and above all compelling to the reader.
Characters are indispensable to fiction. They carry the plot forward on their shoulders. No story or plot can stand on its own without character to buoy it up. Further, or perhaps therefore, it doesn’t matter how clever and tight is your plot, or how good your story, if the characters are flat and lifeless. The characters are the reader’s way into the story and if the reader can’t connect with the story through the characters, the story is dead in the water.
I can read a book with slow pacing and a laid-back plot if the characters are excellent. I cannot under any circumstances read a book, however masterfully plotted, if the characters are boring and unrelatable.
As you read today’s Shelf Life, think of characters you have written—or are writing—and/or characters you’ve enjoyed reading, and consider how you (or how other authors) have consciously or subconsciously employed the five characteristics below to create memorable, round characters. And, if you can think of characters you haven’t been able to engage with in fiction, or characters you’ve written that didn’t quite gel, go through this list and examine where those characters may not have gotten full marks.
A Hook
Most stories start with a character. Not all. Sometimes a story starts with somebody’s eleventy-first birthday party setup but usually the reader’s entryway into the story is character. There’s probably at least one character right on page one, either narrating the story (first person) or with the third-person narrator perched on their shoulder, or inside their skull.
It’s critical that these characters come with a hook—something that interests the reader right away. The first paragraphs and pages of a story are the hardest to keep a reader engaged in: The reader doesn’t know anything and immersing oneself (as the reader) in a new story, setting, and characters is uncomfortable. The reader has made a low investment, if any investment at all, in these characters and this story. They could peel off at any second, put your story down, and start reading something else.
Characters have to have a hook that get readers invested in them fast. It doesn’t have to carry you through the whole story—the novelty of the hook can wear off over time. Readers will invest more in the characters as they get to know them. But the hook needs to get around that reader and pull them into the story like a vaudeville hook pulling an unfunny performer off stage when their time is up.
Something about your character should be interesting and different from the world around them, right from the outset. Security and social position aren’t good enough reasons for Elizabeth Bennet to marry Mr Collins, even though those seem like perfectly good reasons to her sisters and mother. Harry Potter is an orphaned wizard living in among particularly horrible muggles. Katniss Everdeen knows the odds are excellent for her to be reaped into the Hunger Games today, but she still gets up early to put food on the table while the rest of her family is sleeping.
Mystery
Okay, the reader is hooked. Your character has leapt that first hurdle. The reader is continuing to read through the story. The plan is proceeding apace. The next thing every character needs is a little bit of mystery in their life—something to create dramatic tension and to get the reader more and more invested in the character by inviting inviting them to ask questions.
Mystery comes in several different forms. For instance:
Mystery may be something that the character knows, but is withholding from other characters and/or the audience—a secret.
Mystery may be something that the character does not know about themself, that they must find out. For instance, why does Harry’s scar hurt in the presence of Professor Quirrel?
Mystery may come from outside the character themself—it may be a question of what other characters want with or from them. For instance, why has the resistance chosen Katniss to be their figurehead and pawn?
Even if you’re not writing or reading a mystery, there’s probably a little mystery surrounding the main characters. Why does the heroine of a romance move back to her hometown after all these years? Why was the Chosen One in a fantasy story chosen? Why is the detective in a noir story the only person who can help the desperate dame—or why is the case so personally traumatic for him to take?
Motivation
All characters must have motivation. And—I know, this is unfair—their motivation must make some kind of logical sense for the character and, therefore, for the reader. Even psychiatric delusions have their own internal logic. Your character’s motivation doesn’t have to make sense from a real-world perspective but it has to make sense to the character.
Good news! You don’t need one motivator to carry your character through the entire plot. Character motivation changes all the time. In fact, I daresay, that almost every character wishes to maintain their status quo to some degree, prior to the inciting action:
Katniss Everdeen wants to not be chosen in the reaping.
Lizzie Bennet wants to not get married and stay a single lady.
Even Harry Potter, whose life sucks, wants to lay low and antagonize the Dursleys as little as possible, at the outset of his story, because he has nowhere else to go if they put him out.
Then the inciting incident happens and the motivation changes:
Katniss Everdeen wants to survive the Hunger Games.
Lizzie Bennet wants to get to the bottom of why Mr Darcy rejected her.
Harry Potter wants to attend Hogwarts and succeed there.
Motivations can continue to change throughout the story. Harry doesn’t have long to spend being the best magical student he can be before he’s changed motivation again—to find Nicholas Flamel.
Relatability
You will have heard this one before: Characters need to have flaws. And I don’t mean like “she’s beautiful, intelligent, funny, and perfect in every way but she’s clumsy and trips over her own feet” (looking at you, Bella Swan).
Characters have to have flaws because we have flaws. I mean, you guys have flaws, I obviously don’t have any flaws. Anyway, people have flaws and we want to connect with characters by relating to them—by seeing ourselves reflected in them.
This doesn’t mean that characters have to be likable. Plenty of real people aren’t likable but are still relatable. It’s not just flaws that make a character relatable. It’s beliefs (including wrong or false beliefs), fears, likes, dislikes, quirks, strengths, blind spots, wants and desires, and, yes, flaws. Ron Weasley was afraid of spiders. Primrose Everdeen enjoyed taking care of stray animals. Mr. Darcy was on the autism spectrum. These are all very relatable characters.
We don’t call these “characteristics” for nothing.
Growth
Finally, every character needs to grow and develop throughout the story—every (major) character needs a character arc. Any character who is unchanged at the end of the story versus the beginning of the story is static, and that’s the opposite of what you want your characters to be.
In every story, the characters go on a journey. That journey is the plot—the series of actions the characters undertake in the telling of the story. That’s narrative, in a nutshell.
But characters also go on an internal journey at they same time as they go on their plot journey. The events of the plot, and their interactions with other characters along the way, transforms them just as they transform the community or world around them by participating in the plot.
Remember like two minutes ago when we were talking about flaws? One of the major reasons to give your character a true flaw is so they may transform that flaw into something else entirely—a strength—by the end of their arc.
Katniss Everdeen starts out a character who can’t or won’t rely on anyone else. She doesn’t trust her mother to take care of her or her sister. She doesn’t trust her sister to look out for herself. She doesn’t trust anyone in District 12 except for Gale, with whom she is friendly but on whom she would never rely. Early on we learn that she was forced to rely on one person, one time: Peeta, who gave her bread when she and her family were starving to death. By the end of her three-book series, at the conclusion of her character arc, she has come to rely her friends, and chosen family, and especially on Peeta, to the extent that she relies on him to tell her the difference between delusions and reality. Katniss develops the ability to trust others in spite of her traumatic past and the even-more-traumatic events of the plot.
Characters can also develop in the opposite way—a strength can develop into a tragic flaw if the character’s arc goes the other direction, as Walter White, from Breaking Bad, conveyed his intelligence and enduring love of science into a criminal empire. He’s also a great example of a character who went from somewhat likable to completely unlikable, while remaining compelling the whole time.
If you have these five things in a character: A development arc, relatability, motivators, a little air of mystery, and a hook—then congrats. Odds are you’ve got yourself a compelling character. And if you’re worried that you have a character who isn’t as compelling as you’d like—perhaps you can use this article as a toolkit for their diagnosis.
Happy characterizing!
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