Love it or Hate it

Hey guys! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I sincerely hope you enjoyed last month’s series, and I’m pretty excited to see what you think of the new one. It always takes me a while to think up a new series for a month, primarily because I want to share things with you that I’ve learned, things I’ve experienced, or even things I think we could change about the writing world… but this month, I wanted to take a more fun route. And this month, it’s for the writers out there.

What are readers looking for in a novel? Do you know?

I have a pretty good idea, and I’ve put together eight to share with you this month.

#1: Characters We Love

Obvious, no? But it’s harder to create than you might think. In fact, it’s downright impossible to create a character who everyone will love. Everyone takes issue with something these days. Our job, as writers, is to create a character who is loveable in our eyes—because if the character is loveable to us, he’ll be loveable to the readers we’re trying to reach.

But how do we create a loveable character?

What does it mean to create a loveable character?

How do we know when we’ve done it?

These are a bit harder to quantify, but I’ll do my best for you.

Loveable characters are the ones readers can’t get enough of—and by extension, it usually means they’re the ones we can’t get enough of, either. They’re characters we’d be more than happy to laugh with, cry with, do just about anything with. They’re the ones we’d like to be friends with, the ones we look up to, the ones we aspire to be like. They’re the characters we idolize in society in this day and age.

If you’ve created a loveable character, then you’ve created a character who will keep readers coming back to your story time and time again. You’ll have made someone they want to be with, someone they enjoy the company of—and by extension, you’ll have started something they can’t get enough of.

But, of course, how do we know when we’ve done it?

For me, I judge by my own love of my characters. I do this because I’ve noticed, after years of writing, that the characters I love the most are the characters my readers love the most. If I’m not as fond of the main character in a given book, my readers aren’t either. But when I love my character, when I cherish them, my readers will too.

But, of course, loveable characters are only one piece of the fictive puzzle that makes up our worldmaking lives. Thursday, let's talk about another.

[love]

{Rani Divine}