How To Write A Successful Minecraft Fanfiction

7: Characters

Sorry I haven't uploaded a chapter in so long. I kinda forgot this book existed.

Characters are obviously one of the most important parts of the story. Without characters, there is no story. Likewise, if you have bad characters, you'll have a bad story.

Let's start with the main character, aka the protagonist. As cliché as this might sound, the protagonist should be well-rounded, likable, and a good leader (unless your protagonist is specifically different for your own reasons). To make a good protagonist, however, s/he should have one (or more) major flaw(s) that prevents them from achieving whatever the goal of the story is. But, this character should be able to overcome this flaw near the end of the story, thus resolving the conflict. This is most commonly referred to as character development.

I didn't do a very good job of this with my books. Steve did not really have a flaw that he overcame. But, let's say Steve has terrible aim with a bow and arrow. Throughout the entire book of AMS, he always misses his intended target, or gets lucky. Then, at the end of the book when the Ender Dragon is flying around, it's up to him to kill it. But he has to use a bow and arrow. He misses a few times, but finally, when all hope seems lost, he manages to hit the dragon, killing it and ending the final conflict. That may have made for better character development.

The flaw doesn't have to be physical, though. That's just an example. There could be some sort of mental ( i.e. always forgetting important information) or emotional (i.e. something keeps reminding them of their dead parents and causes them to stop what they're doing) flaw that the main character has as well.

Now let's talk about the amount of characters in your book. Don't pull a Todd and let 30 people enter characters in it. That was a huge mistake. The ideal amount of characters in your book is 4-6 main characters. You can have as many side characters as you want, as long as they aren't essential to the storyline.

Why?

Let's be honest. People are gonna forget who's who. Do you think your readers only read your series? That's not true (in most cases). They read other books while they wait for you to update (lmao) that have other characters, and eventually will forget who everyone is and what traits they have.

I had 30+ characters in TFOM and sometimes I couldn't even remember things about some of them. So try to keep it down to 4-6 main characters.

In AMS, my main characters were Steve, Ruby, Jay, and Kirai. Basically everyone else was a side character. This is a good amount (although I probably had too many side characters).

If you read Rebel's Moone Trilogy, she had five main characters in her first book: Kat, Jake, Infinity, Gordon, and Abby. That was basically it. But that's a good amount.

The bottom line: don't have too many characters.

Lastly, I'll talk about the personalities of your characters. I already talked about your protagonist, but what about the other main characters?

You should try to give each of your characters very different personalities. For example, you could make the smart one, the tough one, the funny one, etc. It's good for the other main characters to have their own flaws to overcome throughout the book, but they shouldn't be as prominent as the protagonist's development.

Jay was the funny one, Kirai was the tough one, Ruby was the smart one. That's pretty much it for AMS. TFOM had way too many characters, I'm not even gonna get into that.

So yeah. Different personalities for the characters is key.

In conclusion, you should not have too many main characters, but all of them should have character development. The protagonist's character development should be the focus. And all the main characters should have different personalities.

Authors, feel free to leave any advice on the above topics or anything else related to characters in the comments here.

I plan on doing a separate chapter about villains, if I ever get around to it lmao.

As always, leave suggestions!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to vote, comment, and follow!

~Radishologist