I'm putting off plot - AGAIN - to talk about something that I believe requires more immediate attention: the make-believe entities that walk around your meticulously crafted make-believe worlds doing things that nobody cares about for reasons nobody cares about. These are your characters.
Your job as a writer is to make the reader care about your story and you do that through the characters. Most people seem to think it works the other way around, or that the story will stand on its own, and that road leads to disappointment and sadness for everyone.
I see a lot of amateur writers pushing the responsibility for communication onto their audience, and that's nothing but an excuse to avoid the work necessary to improve. At some point, it's ok to draw a line and refuse to cross it because not everyone is going to love your book no matter what you do, but don't abandon an audience simply because they don't "get you." That mentality is lazy and undeservedly pretentious.
Your goal is to engage a reader so they pick up and finish your book, and hopefully like it enough that they'll try out the next one simply because it's you who wrote it. You can only do that by making the plot, the setting, the characters, and the outcome important to them.
WTF? you ask, how do you take a pretend person (or robot, or balloon, or desk lamp) and make a real person fall in love with them? How do you get people to hate an antagonist so much that they swoon from excitement and relief when the protagonist claims victory? How do you make someone desire to see your protagonist and their love interest finally get together? How do you make them cry when an important figure dies? Why is any of that crap even important?
This is an easy question on the surface with a super complex framework underneath. I'm not going to tell you how to manage that framework. I'm going to walk through some of the key points that make characters believable and sympathetic, and as you write you'll discover and learn to use that framework on your own.
In the next few chapters, I'm going to focus on three things: construction, empathy, and relationships, and how these elements work together to engage your readers and get them to commit in a world full of video games, makeup tutorials, and binge-watching Netflix.
YOU ARE READING
How To Write Good: A Lightly Salted Guide to Stepping Up Your Wattpad Game.
Non-FictionPeople will tell you writing is hard. That's a load of crap. Anyone with a pencil can scrawl a line of graphite across a page and call themselves a writer. Does that mean anyone can be an author? No. Only people who are willing to sacrifice their ti...
