7 Reasons Readers Don't Care About Your Novel's Characters

hey guys it's Ellen brought novel editor today I want to talk about seven reasons readers don't care about your characters and what you can do about it I just want to start by saying that a lot of time we think about readers caring about characters we think that it means that our characters need to be likeable that they need to be nice people or good people that we can feel good about rooting for but that's not necessarily the case we care about a lot of characters that aren't necessarily nice people or likable people so you don't have to worry about making your character nicer sometimes in an attempt to make readers care more about characters writers will add more and more good deeds so adopt an orphan or take a homeless person out to dinner and that often actually backfires and makes your character less relatable by making them seem less realistic so today when I'm talking about helping readers to care about your characters I'm not talking about making the characters nicer or more likeable but rather making readers more interested and more invested in what happens to your characters because that's what gets readers to keep reading if readers don't care about your characters it's probably not an issue of personality it's very rare that I see a character in an unpublished book and there's just something about them that makes them inherently unlikable it's very unusual but that's the problem if we didn't care about Tyler Durden and Deadpool and Dexter and how we can care about your character I guarantee it one more disclaimer before I get into the tips you're never going to please everybody with your character there are always going to be people who don't like your characters and that is okay do not worry about it even though a lot of people might not like your character for one reason or another it's not going to worry about there are people who hate Harry Potter who hate Samwise Gamgee who hate Winnie the Pooh there's somebody who hates every character don't let one or two opinions about your character make you feel like you need to change something you're not going to please everybody but if you're getting the same feedback over and over a especially if you're at the querying stage and agents or publishers are telling you they don't care about your characters they can't relate to your characters or often they'll say they can't connect to your characters this video is for you so reason number one that readers don't care about your characters could be that you're not really conveying their personality something that I see a lot is that the writer knows the personality so well just everything about the character is so clear but they're not actually putting it on the page what's on the page isn't really conveying the character's personality at all so one thing that can help a lot is distance and I know that can be really difficult especially because writers tend to reread up especially the first chapter or two so many times that you might have completely memorized it so getting that distance can be really hard so another trick that can help is to have somebody else read your first chapter and ask them what do you think the personality of this character is who do they seem like to you what are their personality traits and just see what happens this can be really eye-opening a lot of the time writers think that they're really clearly conveying elements of the personality but it is just not coming across on the page at all or it's coming across completely differently for example one time I worked with a writer and they thought that they were conveying guilt that this character was guilty but really the character was coming across this sort of aloof and uncaring and it was because they were trying to show this information in a way that just was not coming across to the reader at all so you might find that part of the reason readers aren't caring about your character is because their personality is not coming across in the first chapter reason number two is that you're telling the reader what the character is like but you're not showing it actions speak a lot louder than words when you're trying to convey character personality so if you tell the reader that your character is witty but you're not showing that character give witty comebacks or say funny things to other characters you're not really conveying their personality very well and also it tends to seem a little arrogant and kind of a little almost controlling of the reader if you tell personality traits especially positive personality traits so if I say Suzie was such a sweet nice girl it kind of makes Suzy seem annoying and arrogant even if you're saying it in third person and it's not really Suzy saying it at all so it's generally better to set a scene so that you can show the reader that that Suzy is a nice person so maybe Cesar stands up for a classmate that's embarrassed that has a lot more power than telling about the personality traits so make sure that you're showing your character do things that are iconic of their personality and as a little secondary tip make sure that you're not showing personality traits that are not indicative of who your character is because you can confuse the reader and we tend to latch on to our first impressions of characters so Suzy seems kind of bullying even if you justify that if that happens in the first chapter you've probably painted the readers expectations of her for the entire book so make sure that that first chapter is showing the personality traits and showing prominent personality traits the ones you really want the reader to latch on to the third reason readers might not connect to your character is that you're showing their most negative traits but you're not explaining why they have those traits now I don't mean that you should go into your entire characters backstory because that is not a good idea especially early on in the book but you do want to give some kind of indication of why a character might be acting in a particular way and this can be just one sentence the sort of subtle hint at what's going on for example maybe you have a character who uses women and it can be very unappealing to read about if you give some indication as a motivation maybe indicating that he's trying to suppress a memory that he doesn't want to come to the surface or maybe he's very insecure and he's trying to cover up that insecurity just a little bit of a hint of why they have the negative trait can help the reader to relate to them and not to see them as negative and it can make them more interesting to read about because then you want to learn more details and more depth about why this care has come to be this way reason number four that readers might not connect to your characters is that you're not indicating what the character wants it's really hard to connect with a character who seems content and happy with life is there just sailing through their life and everything is great the reader really doesn't have much incentive to care about them because they seem like they're doing just fine so make sure that you're showing what your character wants what do they once what is a long for what do they want to be different about their life because that's what will get the reader interested you can have the coolest personality for your character and a killer plot but if the character doesn't want anything readers are not going to care reason number five that readers might not connect your character is you're not introducing a problem if your character wants something there needs to be something that stands in the way this is very closely related to the character not wanting something but wanting something alone doesn't create a conflict a conflict occurs when the character wants something and then something stands in the way of what they want so make sure that those obstacles are there because readers will want to see how your character overcomes them if your main plot does not start in the first chapter you can create a secondary problem for your character to overcome prior to the main conflict and that can give a sense of momentum if you're struggling to create problems in the early parts of the novel the sixth reason readers might not connect your character is that your character is a stereotype or a trope if you're relying on conventions that we've seen many many times before it becomes a lot more difficult for readers to connect or find those characters interesting that doesn't mean that it's impossible the key is just to combine trace it in unexpected or different ways and to not put typical characters into typical scenarios for example an awkward new girl at school is a little bit harder to connect to because we've seen that a lot of times a magical orphan we've seen that a lot of time it can be a little bit trickier to get readers to connect especially if you're not showing other unique elements of your plot early on the seventh reason that readers might not connect your character if you're not putting the reader in the characters shoes this can be a very easy thing to overlook but sensory information is really important we want to feel like we're right there next to the character and that can be very difficult to experience if the character senses are described in a very bland or distant way or if they're not described at all so things like the feel of their clothes or sweat on their hands or flipping our hair or butterflies in their stomachs those things help the reader to feel connected and as if they're there in the character's body and they can kind of experience things as the character experiences it sensory information is really important in that in a lot of the time it's just so easy to overlook so I really don't feel 7 tips help you and that you have a better understanding of why readers might not be connecting to your characters tomorrow I am going to be back with another video about antagonists and how to write really scary and really exciting antagonists this video has been part of my novel boot camp series I will be posting a video three to four days per week throughout August I'll also be hosting free workshops on my blog if you're interested you can go over to my blog and check it out I'll put a link in the description happy writing guys

Channel: Ellen Brock

Views: 196,568

Rating: 4.9720664 out of 5

Keywords: novel writing, writing, characters, strong characters, writing characters, novel, creative writing, believable characters, likeable characters, relatable characters, novel boot camp, ellen brock, don't care, don't relate to, can't connect, protagonist, side characters, characterization

Id: nTUXlvOzgfg

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2017