Forcing Readers To Like Characters

The story you’re writing may have the kind of lead character that people automatically root for. He may be a good guy doing the right thing; or a decent woman trying to sort out something that needs sorting. Heroic behaviour and overcoming adversity can bypass the whole need to tell the reader this is someone to cheer on. It’s obvious.

But they might be a little more complex than that. Maybe flawed, maybe even a bit awkward. Or they may not get to their heroic moment until much later in the story. How do you get the reader on board as quickly as possible without having to add ‘stick with it, things get good later’ at the bottom of each page?

Well, actually there are a number of techniques to encourage the reader to engage emotionally with the character. Many of these techniques are highly manipulative. If you want your characters to be pure organic creations produced from a mixture of sweat, inspiration and caffeine, you may not want to know the dirty tricks to hooking a reader’s attention against their will.

But you should bear in mind that readers like being manipulated. We enjoy it. Suspending disbelief is something we do easily and readily. Deep down we know it isn’t real, but we don’t care. That’s why you can have a man on a stage in a bad wig in front of a fake backdrop, and the audience is transported to 16^th century Italy. 

When I talk about likeability, I don’t necessarily mean you have to make the reader feel like they’re reading about their best buddy. You don’t have to make a character liked, but you do need to make him interesting. What you really want is for the reader to enjoy reading about your character. Making him likeable is one way to do that, but there are other ways to form an emotional attachment.  And many of them work just as well for side characters and even villains.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be doing a series of posts on techniques to bond reader to character. These are three main areas I’ll be looking at:

1. Sympathy

The most manipulative way to make a reader bond with a character is to evoke sympathy. Feeling sorry for someone is a strong motivator to keep reading about them.

Any time a character has the odds against him or is suffering, especially if there’s a degree of unfairness involved, the reader will start rooting for him.

This emotion is so strong that even if the person suffering isn’t very nice, we’ll still feel for him. One unarmed Nazi against five large US soldiers, and even though he deserves to get thrashed, it just doesn’t feel fair. Obviously there are other factors to take into account with an example like that, but at a basic level we always look at the situation, doesn't matter if the story is about a pregnant woman or a Masai warrior, and evaluate it's fairness independent of morality.

This is something writers can use to their advantage when trying to elicit sympathy, often by using quite sneaky methods. I’ll be going over all these techniques (there's a lot of them) in the next few posts.

2. Recognition

When characters do things we recognise, we become interested in them. That may seem like a blanket statement, and clearly there are plenty of things we recognise that we have no interest in whatsoever, but the kind of thing I’m referring to goes beyond basic human functions like eating, sleeping and breathing.

A man goes to work on a bus. We recognise what he is doing and why, but is it interesting?

Clearly not. Just because you are able to recognise what he’s doing doesn’t mean you’re going to become fascinated by his actions.

But, when you recognise a situation on a human level, you become invested in the character. If the man gets on a bus and he’s cramped and has an armpit in his face, and he’s trying to read a paperback book one-handed while turning pages with his nose, then you recognise an experience. You relate to his situation.

The danger is that you can become too focused on small things and make the narrative very mundane and slow, but good writers can even make that work (sometimes).

3. Admiration

The easiest and probably most common way to make a character liked is for them to help somebody else.

How they go about doing that obviously makes a difference. Helping an old lady across the road is going to get a different reaction to saving a child from a burning building.

The kinds of books where a character is constantly saving others and performing selfless acts of heroism are very popular, many blockbuster novels have this kind of character in the lead role, but not everyone wants to write a breathless thriller. 

The underlying factor is that if you think someone is cool you’ll want to know more about them. And making them cool doesn’t have to involve constant action set-pieces.

How they look, how they act, how they talk—all these things can impress readers and make them want to read more. Highly skilled characters, those with rare abilities, those who do or say what we’d like to but are too chicken to, can all generate a strongly positive reader disposition.

This doesn’t just apply to heroic types, villains can also benefit from these attributes.

Sympathy, Recognition, Admiration: those are the three forms of emotional attachment I’m going to be looking at in more depth over the next few posts. 

Making readers bond with characters quickly is something a lot of writers have difficulty with, so hopefully breaking it down into specific elements will help give you options with how to do that. 

We’ll start with creating sympathy for characters in Monday’s post. See you then.

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