Photo by Ekaterina Shakharova on Unsplash
Hey y’all visiting for the A-to-Z challenge, welcome and salutations. One of my jobs is being an editor of genre fiction, both a developmental editor and a copy editor. Once a month in this blog, I go off on rants about what I see a lot of – so writers know what editors see a lot of and know to NOT DO THAT.
Today’s rant: Likeability.
Your characters need to be likeable or at least sympathetic.
If you are writing a romance, the romantic leads NEED to be likeable. Mysteries can break the likeability rule as it helps reader think anyone could have been the killer, but please, for romances, at the very least, make the leads likeable.
And to pull likeability off, some of the following things need to happen:
One: The First Impression cannot be a negative one. Just like meeting people in real life, first impressions with fictional characters need to be positive. Don’t have your character kick a puppy, or whine, or betray their friends or any of that before we see something we like about them first. Strangely, you can have the positive first interaction, and then do a flashback where they kick the puppy, and the reader will be more likely to forgive them or make excuses because they know the person is a “good guy”. Do likeable things first.
Two: For a Point of View character that will be around for a while (like in a series), make sure they are entertaining enough that the audience wants to hang with them for multiple books. Do they make a reader laugh, make them think, or make them feel comfortable? No one wants to hang with people they don’t like.
Three: Create a connection (empathy) with the reader (before anything bad happens) in two of the following five ways: Likeable, Sympathy, Jeopardy, Power, or Humor (this list was suggested by Darynda Jones way back in 2014 on Magical Words). Likeable is not telling us everyone likes them, it is showing us people like them. Make them a nice character. Sympathy is a understanding what the character is going through, stuff like a parent recently died or getting yelled at by the boss. Jeopardy is something is a problem, they are late with their rent (through no fault of their own), they just got kidnapped. Power can be used to make a bad guy more connectable; everyone loves a person with power. Humor – snark is a wonderful thing.
Make your characters someone that people want to spend time with.
AVOID THE FOLLOWING (ALL EXAMPLES FROM BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS)
- Don’t have the character be an impulsive, lazy, backstabbing thief to friends and family, before they are exiled. The developmental recommendation is start with the exile (jeopardy) and their skill at breaking into buildings outside the community to get the food needed (power), THEN backtrack to them stealing from family and friends, lying about the stealing, stealing impulsively when they decide they are hungry. I hated that main character so much for all the damage they did in that first chapter before their exile. The author needed to switch the first two chapters. Yes, the main character was a teenager learning how to be a better person as the character growth arc for the book, but the reader needed the YA protagonist to not need a slapping when they first meet them.
- Don’t treat profanity and vulgarity as humor. Unrelenting cursing is not witty dialog; Reservoir Dogs worked because of the meaning of what they said, not the words used. Shock-value is a power-play, not humor. Witty dialog takes work. Humor isn’t easy. Yes, profanity and vulgarity can be used in a humorous way, but focus on the HUMOR, not the expletives. If you want to be funny, be fucking funny not just fucked up.
- Don’t have us meet our anti-hero while he is being more anti- than hero. Don’t have us meet him promising to kill someone after bribing someone else, then blowing up the bar which the other characters we have already met are performing at, before we see the first little bit of the hero side. Once the impression of “a-hole” has been set, it isn’t going anywhere.
Don’t have a reader read the chapter title of “Ask Me If I Care” and have them answer “You know, I don’t” and close the book.
Make your characters likeable.
Comment below on a book where the likability of the characters made you either (1) stop reading or (2) keep reading even though you didn’t enjoy the plot, you just like the characters.
So, you’re saying the old “enemies to friends/lovers” trope is canceled, Erin? I’m not so sure I agree, although I think the advice is sound with regard to not having them kick a puppy. But coming off as an arrogant a-hole who is later revealed to be anything but? Might still work. Assuming BOTH leads aren’t total jerks.
That said, I do think the trope of “woman reforms a-hole” is over (or should be). Talk about a fantasy. People don’t change that much – certainly not fast enough to be anything but a multi-book, epic SAGA. And in this era of tl;dr, no one’s going to invest the time and energy to read it.
I had to laugh at “Don’t have a reader read the chapter title of “Ask Me If I Care” and have them answer “You know, I don’t” and close the book.” It’s almost like you reached into my head – I have started to open links today, only to be confronted by ads and pop-ups and – I even thought I’d fallen into a time-warp to the 1990s, with all the flaming hoops website devs were expecting visitors to jump through – and at least five times this morning have decided, “I just don’t care enough to bother with this,” and closed the tab. It happens all too often with books, too.
Even Hannibal Lecter is a “sympathetic character” in his own way. Characters who are 100% saints or demons are, above all else, BORING. Readers want characters they can relate to and I think that goes for both the protagonists and antagonists, to varying degrees.
“enemies to friends/lovers” work fine under these rules – Enemies fighting over power; who rules the clan, boss-employee dynamics, rivals on the campus. The enemy can be arrogant, but you know (underneath it all because we are programed that way – thank you capitalism) s/he must have redeeming qualities otherwise they wouldn’t have power. Then have one other things to show a reason to make them approachable.
Example of sympathy with power:
Julius stood on the opposite side of the senate floor, lifting his drink to me. Officially it was to the person in front of him, but he made eye contact with me to let me know Marcus had agreed to sign the bill I had been fighting, gaining him the majority. Show off. His stupid, amazing rise from a slave’s son to senator made him a star everyone wanted to pin their dreams on, though the man had no dreams, only nightmares.
I appreciate the tips.
I like this take. “Likeability” gets weaponized against complicated, curmudgeonly women characters sometimes…but even when I’m writing those people I know that the reader has to WANT to spend time with this person, so they still have to be likeable on a certain level, even if they’re not kind or soft in general. @samanthabwriter from
Balancing Act
Like your Lizard Lady – she is powerful (both superhero powers, but also competence), she had sympathy for being put out to pasture for her age, and a wonderful snark. But actually LIKEABLE, not so much – but we were more than willing to spend time hanging out with her.
If I don’t like the main character, yeah, I’m not continuing to read. Very true.