Making your readers connect to your characters?

[TheOtherTeacher]

I recently received this feedback from an anon

I gave it a 4 for originality, but the story, overall, seemed to lack feeling. I honestly didn't feel anything for the characters.

What tips do you have for helping readers connect with the characters?

 

[joy_of_cooking]

Total shot in the dark but are your characters maybe not white?

https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture...mes-fans-upset-character-rue-black-flna560267

(Tl;Dr when hunger games came out some people were vocally upset that someone who died was black because they felt it reduced the emotional impact of her death. No, really, they said so.)

 

[TheLobster]

Could you perhaps link the story in question? It would be more convenient than perusing your profile (which your signature doesn't link to).

 

[samhasstories]

Do you feel connected to your characters? When I feel connected to my characters I find their personality comes through almost naturally. I of course can't speak for readers, but in my experience that impression translates to reactions and feedback. If I don't feel connected to a character, I just keep writing them until I do, or I boot them out and put someone else in their place.

 

[TheOtherTeacher]

Could you perhaps link the story in question? It would be more convenient than perusing your profile (which your signature doesn't link to).

There are Vampires
Be warned, it's long! (23k)

Thanks for the suggestion about adding my author's profile to my signature. I honestly hadn't thought about it!

 

[onehitwanda]

What tips do you have for helping readers connect with the characters?

who are they? who are they pretending to be? who are they pretending to be to themselves. Why? Why are they lying? Why are they doing what they're doing? What do they want? What do they think they want? What does the person who loves them want for them? Why? How far are they willing to go to get what they want? Will they lie? Will they commit murder? Why? Or why not? What do they believe? Why do they believe it? Will they lose these beliefs or have them strengthened? Who do they want to be? Who do they think they want to be? What does their mother think of them? Their father? What are their strengths? Their flaws? What do they think are strengths that are actually fatal flaws? Will they realise this? Is their fate to be loved or to be discarded? How badly will they be hurt? How much will they lose? If everything, why? If not everything, why not? Have they already lost everything? How did they carry on? What is their goal? What is their quest?

And, most importantly, why should I care about them?

If you want people to care about characters, the characters have to be real enough to be worth caring about. Nobody cares about Tilly the cheerleader with the perfect perky breasts and the tight bum who can have multiple orgasms and suck a golf ball through a hosepipe.

People care about Matilda, who prefers to be called Tilly because she hates the name Matilda because it's her dead Gran's name and she still has nightmares about when her Gran fed her that curdled custard horror that had been in the fridge for a month, Tilly who has breasts that boys like but that ache after a long day and are too big, really, for what her mental map is of what she'd like to look like, which is like Keira Knightly, really, because she's so glamorous and different and Tilly is just a dumb (well, maybe not so dumb) girl from Tallahassee who somehow got to go to college - the first girl in her family to ever do so - and who has to pretend to like boys so her ultra-religious family won't Cut Her Off...

(This is a very blunt-instrument example. But sometimes it helps to be direct).

Make. Me. Care.

If I don't feel a rapport with the characters then your story might as well be a page out of a dictionary.

 

[TheLobster]

So I obviously haven't read the story in full but I think I draw some conclusions from the fact that I struggled to even reach the Aunt Marie's reveal.

You are writing in beige prose. This isn't necessarily bad but it seems uncommon in erotica, and I believe it requires quite a lot of skill to employ effectively. I wouldn't personally attempt to write a story in such a style because I definitely do not possess said skill, so it's also difficult for me to tell if you do. But at least when it comes to the specific combination of simple prose, very short sentences, and present tense, I found that it makes it really hard for me to get "into" the story. It's like you want me to always go, go, go forward, never stopping, never immersing myself into the setting and, yes, connecting with the characters.

There seems to be little background exposition about, well, anything. You do mention in the foreword that the story takes place in the US but that should really be in the story itself. You need more description of pretty much everything, from places to character appearance to general atmosphere. Give your readers' imagination something to work with; you can do that without falling into the erotica tropes of quoting exact measurements and bust sizes.

There also seem to be little emotion felt by MC during and after the reveal, or at least it is not properly conveying. That's another point of connection lost: if the reader feels something, and feels like the character should feel it, too, then not fulfilling this expectation causes disconnect.

So basically, characters need to be more than a name and a blank slate for readers to write on. With your style of writing, doing this right seems to be extra challenging. Perhaps you may want to consider if you'd like to continue developing this particular approach to storytelling, or maybe try something different.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

What tips do you have for helping readers connect with the characters?

If you want your readers to connect to the characters, they have to care about them. There are different ways to do this but the easiest way is to make your characters relatable. Give them traits that the average reader can understand, or at least don't need to suspend too much belief to get behind. Everyday mundane characters are easy to relate to, but also can be boring, so often you strike a balance - the struggling single mom with a crabby boss is very relatable. The guy desperate to arrange visitation rights with his estranged kids is very relatable. A guy who always comes home to his loyal dog that he loves is relatable.

This does not mean that sorcerers and superheroes aren't relatable. If a reader picks up a sorcery story, they are already willing to suspend that much belief that there will be magic and dragons and such, so a sorcerer who cares deeply for his protege to protect him from grave danger, that human element can still make him very relatable.

Relateablilty is important because the strongest connections that you make with the reader are usually and often wholly emotional and it's much easier to make an emotional connection with a character that the reader can relate to and therefore empathize with. If we care about that character, we will share that character's struggles and feel those same emotions. This is why 'Mary Sue' characters are such an eyeroll to so many readers. They are too perfect to relate to, and so we don't care about their struggles, therefore we experience a bland and unemotional read - meh, no fun.

When you write your character in a given situation, imagine what they are feeling, then feel what they are feeling, get into that space emotionally. Then write it down. If you do a good enough job of conveying that emotion in words, the chances increase heavily that the reader will pick at least some of that up and share some of that emotion. When that happens, they connect to the character and the story. When they care, they have to keep turning the page.

 

[Lifestyle66]

I recently received this feedback from an anon



What tips do you have for helping readers connect with the characters?

There will ALWAYS be someone who can't feel or connect with your characters. That's because to connect with them the reader must be able to empathize with at least one of them, have the ability to feel the same way as one of the characters.

In my own stories, my MMC is emotionally austere, due to high IQ and potentially mild autism. I wrote the character that way because I know people in real life like that. But MOST readers can't understand someone standing to the side and unemotionally merely observing the world. My MFC is, as she readily admits, "a selfish bitch and a slut" ("But I'm YOUR slut" she says to her husband.) And again, there are those types in the real world I know, but most readers can't relate unless they're a selfish bitch and slut.

And I take consolation in the few 5 ratings I get and the occasional comment saying, "That's ME!" But more often, I receive comments saying "People don't behave that way", and I recognize someone who has no empathy.

EDIT: The only way to get more readers "connecting" with your characters is to write more mainstream, normal (as in average) characters. But in a world of 8 billion people, you can't please them all, and it just takes ONE to post a comment like that anon.

 

[ElectricBlue]

You are writing in beige prose.

That was an interesting diversion. Even better was the link from that page off to IKEA Erotica. That was a fun little read.

 

[StillStunned]

Nobody cares about Tilly the cheerleader with the perfect perky breasts and the tight bum who can have multiple orgasms and suck a golf ball through a hosepipe.

If I wasn't married, Tilly sounds like the kind of person I could care deeply about.

To the OP: from looking at the first page of your story, you've leaned heavily into telling rather than showing. Things like "she said cryptically" and "she asks me the question I've been waiting for".

It feels like the narrator is removed from the events. Observing them on a television, or in that strange state of mind when you're just that little bit too drunk to feel any real connection to the things happening around you.

Even with the style you've chosen, you can draw the reader in much more effectively if the narrator shows more uncertainty.

For instance, you could have said "Her next words are a question. As she speaks them, I realise that I knew the question was coming. Knew it, dreaded it. Hoped for it. I wonder what answer will come out of my mouth."

Make them experience the narrator's feelings and thoughts in real time. If you get the balance right, it can be very powerful, and very intense.

 

[Cagivagurl]

who are they? who are they pretending to be? who are they pretending to be to themselves. Why? Why are they lying? Why are they doing what they're doing? What do they want? What do they think they want? What does the person who loves them want for them? Why? How far are they willing to go to get what they want? Will they lie? Will they commit murder? Why? Or why not? What do they believe? Why do they believe it? Will they lose these beliefs or have them strengthened? Who do they want to be? Who do they think they want to be? What does their mother think of them? Their father? What are their strengths? Their flaws? What do they think are strengths that are actually fatal flaws? Will they realise this? Is their fate to be loved or to be discarded? How badly will they be hurt? How much will they lose? If everything, why? If not everything, why not? Have they already lost everything? How did they carry on? What is their goal? What is their quest?

And, most importantly, why should I care about them?

If you want people to care about characters, the characters have to be real enough to be worth caring about. Nobody cares about Tilly the cheerleader with the perfect perky breasts and the tight bum who can have multiple orgasms and suck a golf ball through a hosepipe.

People care about Matilda, who prefers to be called Tilly because she hates the name Matilda because it's her dead Gran's name and she still has nightmares about when her Gran fed her that curdled custard horror that had been in the fridge for a month, Tilly who has breasts that boys like but that ache after a long day and are too big, really, for what her mental map is of what she'd like to look like, which is like Keira Knightly, really, because she's so glamorous and different and Tilly is just a dumb (well, maybe not so dumb) girl from Tallahassee who somehow got to go to college - the first girl in her family to ever do so - and who has to pretend to like boys so her ultra-religious family won't Cut Her Off...

(This is a very blunt-instrument example. But sometimes it helps to be direct).

Make. Me. Care.

If I don't feel a rapport with the characters then your story might as well be a page out of a dictionary.

Who doesn't want to look like Keira... That is the question, and if they don't why not?
Seriously good example.

 

[Cagivagurl]

I recently received this feedback from an anon



What tips do you have for helping readers connect with the characters?

I recently recieved a comment which said they'd marked my story down to a 4 because he they didn't like my grammar. Too many apostrophe's apparently.

You have been given some excellent advice here already by people who know a lot more about this than I do...
The only thing I can add is. You have to build opposing characters into the story. Readers need somebody to cheer for, and somebody that makes them grit their teeth. Hoping that you'll do something dastardly to them.
If you can build in characters that make the readers cringe, then that helps. When they read, they can see the characters trying to do the right thing, it's just their methods suck.

Characters have to stand out from the list of people you've built into your text... Give them faults. Make them real, allow them to falter, have to think again.
Remember, none of us are perfect... Well apart from...

Cagivagurl

 

[ElectricBlue]

What tips do you have for helping readers connect with the characters?

Write interesting characters; people who readers would want to know, to hang out with, to talk to. Portray them as believable people, not cardboard cutouts, give them emotions, feelings, depth. But let that all unfold in the story, don't dump it all up front. There's another thread about Exposition which makes some good points about that.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I don't know @onehitwanda, stop asking me questions about my story and characters. I just write, and whatever comes out comes out! It's panstering not plotting, and don't always even know their names. Give me a break!!!!

who are they? who are they pretending to be? who are they pretending to be to themselves. Why? Why are they lying? Why are they doing what they're doing? What do they want? What do they think they want? What does the person who loves them want for them? Why? How far are they willing to go to get what they want? Will they lie? Will they commit murder? Why? Or why not? What do they believe? Why do they believe it? Will they lose these beliefs or have them strengthened? Who do they want to be? Who do they think they want to be? What does their mother think of them? Their father? What are their strengths? Their flaws? What do they think are strengths that are actually fatal flaws? Will they realise this? Is their fate to be loved or to be discarded? How badly will they be hurt? How much will they lose? If everything, why? If not everything, why not? Have they already lost everything? How did they carry on? What is their goal? What is their quest?

 

[KeithD]

Having my characters liked usually isn't a goal of mine. The likeability sort of falls in to whatever kind of story it is. For some of my stories, if a reader said he/she liked a character, I'd think they didn't understand the story.

 

[KeithD]

If you want your readers to connect to the characters, they have to care about them.

Depends on the reader and what he/she is here for. This is a dirty story site. This is one of those "It depends/not always" sweeping generalizations. Fiction isn't bound by such limitations. And neither are fiction readers.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Depends on the reader and what he/she is here for. This is a dirty story site. This is one of those "It depends/not always" sweeping generalizations. Fiction isn't bound by such limitations. And neither are fiction readers.

Exactly. Like for many readers, if the girl isn't slutty enough, they won't care about her, for example.

 

[Bramblethorn]

So I obviously haven't read the story in full but I think I draw some conclusions from the fact that I struggled to even reach the Aunt Marie's reveal.

You are writing in beige prose. This isn't necessarily bad but it seems uncommon in erotica, and I believe it requires quite a lot of skill to employ effectively. I wouldn't personally attempt to write a story in such a style because I definitely do not possess said skill, so it's also difficult for me to tell if you do. But at least when it comes to the specific combination of simple prose, very short sentences, and present tense, I found that it makes it really hard for me to get "into" the story. It's like you want me to always go, go, go forward, never stopping, never immersing myself into the setting and, yes, connecting with the characters.

100%. I had trouble getting far enough even to have an "I don't care about the characters" reaction because of the prose style.

There's nothing wrong with spare prose; one can write a compelling character without giving me a paragraph of identikit description. But that doesn't have to mean flat prose.

Did you know:

The capital of California is Sacramento.

Godzilla's name in Japanese is Gojira.

The chemical symbol for gold is Au.

The sequel to "101 Dalmatians" was "102 Dalmatians".

Writing involves communicating ideas. When we're writing a story, we're not just trying to present a bunch of unrelated facts, like the "did you know?" I just made up. Those facts tie into one another; some are closely related, some are competing, some are important, some are unimportant. They need to be structured so the reader can grasp how they all fit together, as they're reading, rather than trying to remember thousands of unrelated Trivia Facts.

Punctuation and sentence structure are part of how we communicate those relationships; here I'm using a semicolon to flag two statements that can be interpreted individually but which are closely connected. A full stop is a bigger divide than a semicolon, and a paragraph break is bigger than a full stop; these signal bigger divisions in the structure.

(Mostly. They can be used for other purposes too, few things in English have just one function. But let's focus on that one for now.)

Here's the preamble to your story:

There are vampires.

They exist.

I know. I'm one.

By 2035, over 25% of the people on the planet are vampires.

Most of the public openly accepts, and even admires those individuals.

The world has changed forever.

I am, in many ways, the one responsible for this.

You're using the exact same structuring to separate "there are vampires" & "they exist" (the same info phrased differently) as you are for separating "I'm one" and "over 25% of the people on the planet are vampires" (two hugely different things).

A little further down:

My older sister Elaine moved out recently to live with her boyfriend. She just had a baby. She names him Malachi. The baby doesn't look like her boyfriend. It looks like our father. We pretend it doesn't.

Mother is no help. I fight off my fathers advances almost every evening. He always asks. I always say no. I fear one day he won't take 'no' for an answer.

I remember my aunt. Mum's sister. They used to be close. I still remember her a little when I was five or six. Aunt Marie, with her curly blonde hair and strongly smelling perfume.

It's the same separation between "my father raped my sister" and "I think I'm next" - the continuation of the same theme - as for the jump to "BTW I have an aunt, let me tell you about her".

This is tiring to read, because I don't have those cues that would usually tell me "continuation of same idea...twist on that idea...okay that idea's complete, you can put it away in memory, now we're going to talk about something different." It's like listening to somebody who speaks at exactly the same speed and exactly the volume no matter what they're talking about.

That's the first thing I'd recommend working on, even before characterisation. Maybe try reading it out, or get a text-to-speech program to read it for you, and think about how it sounds, whether the rhythm of your words is supporting the ideas and feelings you're trying to impart.

On characterisation, one thing that made it hard for me to care about the protagonist in what I read of this story is that she seems to be defined solely by her problems. @onehitwanda has given some good examples on this - it's much easier to empathise with a character if we can see more of them than their misery.

 

[Boobytrap73]

"If I don't feel a rapport with the characters then your story might as well be a page out of a dictionary."

Well gee. You make it sound like there something wrong with reading the dictionary.
~BT73

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Did you know:
The sequel to "101 Dalmatians" was "102 Dalmatians".

The book sequel, The Starlight Barking, was much better. Only it involved worship of Sirius and overthrow of society, so Hollywood was never going to film it.

Back on topic, OP has received great advice in this thread.

 

[AchtungNight]

I mainly worry about whether I like my characters and hope my readers will also. Fortunately, since I like diverse complex people with flaws, it’s usually easy for me to build characters like that.

 

[Britva415]

"Caring about a character" and "feeling for a character" don't necessarily have to be positive situations, either. If I don't care about a villain's villainy, if I don't feel the emotional stakes of a douchebag's douchebaggery, I'm going to have a hard time finding the story engaging.

Relatability is important, as others have said, but it doesn't necessarily mean "identification." Again using villains as the example, great villains have some motivation in them which a reader can recognize in theirself, just not of the same magnitude or with the same outcome. One can relate to the social fuckups of a drunken clumsy boor who's making life difficult for everyone, without identifying with such a character.

Identification is the next step of relatability. A compelling character is one who the reader can see theirself as. Or, it's good if the reader can at least identify with them enough to understand how they handle emotionally familiar situations.

As someone else mentioned, this all comes down to "empathy." None of the factors any of us are talking about will matter at all to a reader without empathy, but those people are rare. More importantly, empathy is the author's tool for flexing the "make the reader relate" muscle.

An author can employ empathy to put theirself in the reader's shoes and find the words which will evoke relatability and caring. The author can employ empathy to sense what words will show rather than tell a reader the character's sense of stakes, their motivations, their sensations, their human condition.

"Beige prose" is a style. Its effectiveness depends on what's being said, not the length and complexity of the phrases with which it's being said. An empathetic author can make it work, and can even make it serve the story sometimes.

 

[THBGato]

OneHitWanda has great advice, so my first suggestion would be:

1) Go and re-read her post. You missed something, I guarantee it.

Then:

b)When you say care for your characters, do you mean "empathise" or "sympathise" or "admire"? Are they an avatar for us, somebody we can pity, or somebody we want to be? There are, of course, other options and a million shades between, but fundamentally think of those three positions.

If it's "empathise" they need to be flawed and real - we need to recognise ourselves in them. Ordinary, aspirational perhaps, sometimes brave, sometimes chickenshit, and you need to show this. Have them wimp out on chatting up the hot object of their desire because they feel out of their league, have them get excited over some minor victory at work, have them feel envious of the sleek car that overtakes them. Don't make them too (un)attractive or it won't fly for most.

If it's "sympathise" work the pity factor. Tragedies, misfortune and cruel obstacles thrown their way that they are largely undeserving of.

If it's "admire" have them save the cat: this could be another person, or it could be themselves. They are who we would like to be and who we might have been has things just been a little different.

Good luck!

 

[onehitwanda]

The book sequel, The Starlight Barking, was much better. Only it involved worship of Sirius and overthrow of society, so Hollywood was never going to film it.

One would have thought that Disney would have been 100% behind flying dogs.