Creating Characters Readers Will Care About Deeply

By Building a Freelance Writing Career from Home
Comments 35
7 Sep 2026

Creating Characters Readers Will Care About Deeply

Begin With Desire, Not Description

Readers do not fall in love with eye colour or a fondness for strong tea. They fall in love with wanting. Before you decide what your character looks like, know what they are chasing and what it will cost them to get it. A character who wants nothing gives us no reason to turn the page, however beautifully rendered their flat in Bristol.

Try this before you draft a scene. Write one sentence beginning "My character wants…" and another beginning "…but they are afraid that…". Those two lines will do more for your plot than three pages of personality notes. A junior doctor who wants the respect of her consultants but is terrified of being seen as ordinary will behave very differently in a hospital lift from one who simply "loves medicine".

Give Them Flaws That Actually Cost Something

A flaw is not a quirk. A fondness for loud waistcoats is a quirk. A flaw is a pattern of behaviour that damages the character and the people around them, and that they cannot easily stop. Pride, cowardice, a need to control, a habit of lying to protect other people's feelings: these generate plot because they create consequences.

Make the flaw expensive. If your character's stubbornness never costs them a job, a friend, or a chance at love, the reader will not believe in it. You can test any flaw with one question: what has it already ruined? If you cannot answer, it is decoration.

Choose one strength and one weakness that come from the same root. Loyalty and an inability to let go. Ambition and a willingness to trample people.
Let the flaw win sometimes. A protagonist who always overcomes their worst instinct in chapter three has nowhere to grow.
Show the flaw from the outside. How does their sister describe them when they are not in the room?

Use Backstory as an Iceberg, Not a Flood

You need to know far more about your character's past than you will ever put on the page. That knowledge shapes their instincts, and readers sense it even when they never see it directly. What they should not get is a chapter-length biography delivered in one sitting.

Reveal backstory the way you would tell a friend about your childhood: in fragments, prompted by the present. A character snaps at a colleague for being late and the memory that surfaces is a father who never came to a school play. Two sentences, placed at the right moment, will land harder than a page of explanation.

Ask yourself what your character has never told anyone. That secret is usually where the novel's real tension lives, and it is worth rationing carefully.

Let Them Contradict Themselves

Real people are inconsistent in ways that make sense once you know them. The generous man who is stingy with his own family. The fearless campaigner who cannot make a phone call. Contradiction is not a flaw in your characterisation; it is the texture that makes a person feel real.

Be specific, too. Generosity is abstract; a woman who pays for everyone's dinner but never lets anyone pay for hers is a person. Specificity also solves the problem of likeability. Readers rarely warm to a list of admirable qualities, but they will warm to someone who keeps a battered tin of their grandmother's buttons for no practical reason.

Earn the Reader's Sympathy Early

You have roughly a chapter to make us care, and it is easier than many writers fear. Readers will follow someone who is competent at something, who is kind to someone weaker, or who is vulnerable in a way we recognise. Any one of these will buy you a great deal of patience.

What readers will not forgive is a character whose only qualification is being cleverer than everyone around them. Give them a moment of genuine connection with another human being, however small, and you have a hook.

Competence: show them doing something well, under pressure.
Kindness: let them help someone with nothing to gain.
Vulnerability: allow them one honest admission of fear.

Stress-Test Your Cast Before You Commit

Once you have a draft, interrogate your characters rather than simply admiring them. The following questions expose the ones who are still cardboard.

If I removed the plot entirely and put two of these people in a lift, would the conversation be interesting?
What does this character want that they would never admit out loud?
What would they do if they lost everything tomorrow? Would they surprise me?
Whose voice could I recognise with the speech tags removed? Try it. Cover the names and read the dialogue aloud.
Does every major character change by the final page, even if only slightly, and even if not for the better?

Answer these honestly and you will find the hollow ones. Then rewrite their scenes with their deepest want in the back of your mind, and watch how much sharper the dialogue becomes. Characters who are genuinely complicated are the ones readers argue about at book groups, recommend to friends, and remember years after they have forgotten the plot. That is the whole game.

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5 Comments

Robert Sonny says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am

I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
Reply
- John Abraham says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am
  
  I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
  Reply
  - Robert Sonnysays Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am
    
    I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
    Reply
Robert Sonny says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am

I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
Reply

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