Are you struggling to finish your first draft, lost in an aimless middle act or lackluster conclusion? Is your manuscript worrisomely bland, lacking a strong narrative thread to draw readers from Point A to Point B? Writer, it’s time to rev up your story’s narrative engine…

The surest way to drive your plot forward is to arm your characters with goals they’re motivated to achieve. Pit your characters’ goals against one another (or against their internal needs), and you’ll create deliciously engaging conflict that keeps readers turning pages.

But how does one develop goals that effectively serve their characters and story? Is it even necessary to give every character a goal, for that matter? Let’s delve into this topic together, writer.

For readers to care what happens next in your story, they must first care about your characters. It’s your job as a writer to foster this reader-character connection, to build the bridge that encourages readers to invest in your characters’ stories. Establishing your characters’ motivations isn’t the only way to encourage this reader-character connection, but it is a surefire way to lend context to your characters’ actions. With context in place, readers can then decide whether your characters and their journeys are worth their emotional investment.

To fill our stories with characters who feel as real as the people around us, we must delve deeper than classic archetypes and easy characterizations. This work begins with developing richly complex personalities for our characters that lend to their most vibrant portrayals. Discover my favorite personality-building tool today >>

At the heart of every good story is conflict.

In plot-driven stories, this conflict is primarily external in nature. The protagonist fights to overcome a series of obstacles and/or defeat an antagonist in their quest to achieve a particular goal. For example, in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen must outlive her fellow competitors and outsmart the game-makers’ vicious whims to survive a televised fight to the death.

However, in character-driven stories, external conflict often takes a back seat. Instead, it’s internal conflict that drives the story forward as the protagonist struggles to overcome a core fear or flaw to achieve a particular goal and/or become a better version of themselves. This fear or flaw often manifests in a false belief that’s otherwise known as the “lie” your character believes. It’s this lie that we’re going to explore in detail today.

External conflict often plays a major role in genre fiction, forming the foundation for a story’s plot as the protagonist struggles to achieve their goal in the face of opposition. As such, many genre fiction writers spend a considerable amount of time developing their story’s plot arcs while giving little thought to an equally powerful story element: character arcs.

As writers, we hold the power to counteract marginalization and discrimination in literature by writing inclusively. When we actively work to improve the quality and diversity of the representation in our stories, we help dismantle the social hierarchy, expand our readers’ worldview, and ultimately ensure that every reader can see themselves in the pages of their favorite books.

We’ve already discussed how the events that took place in your characters’ pasts should affect who they are when your story begins. Backstory gives your characters a sense of history, of lives that extend beyond the confines of the story you’re telling, ultimately helping readers view your characters as fully-realized. Backstory can even provide insight into your characters’ beliefs, worldviews, and motivations—all vital characterization elements that should affect the way your characters act and the decisions they make throughout your story.

As you can see, taking care to develop your characters’ backstories is essential to your story’s success. Today, I’d like to take an even deeper dive into backstory, exploring the aspect of your characters’ past that is perhaps most essential of all: their ghost.

As writers, it’s our job to craft fully-realized characters—characters that feel as real as the people around us. And like the people around us, this means our characters should be flawed.

Flaws and moral failings are, after all, an integral part of what it means to be human. Without these shortcomings, humanity would experience little conflict, triumph, or growth—all elements that define the stories we write. Simply put, for a character to feel real, they must share in our flawed humanity.

Readers today want to get deep into our characters rather than being told what they are feeling. Which means our characters must feel, react, emote, and process in natural, believable ways. Deep POV has become the norm across genres.

“Show, don’t tell” is the golden rule of fiction. But it’s easier said than done. If we show too much, we risk boring our readers (and ourselves) or overwriting. If we show too little, we risk failing to adequately reveal the character’s emotions and, hence, fail to evoke any emotional response in our readers. 

As we balance narrative, backstory, dialogue, action, and direct thoughts, we have to be mindful of the overarching purpose of all of it: to artfully show the character’s emotional state through her mind-set, thoughts, behavior, dialogue, and body language. It is not easy to do well. The saying “Easy reading is hard writing” is a truth seasoned authors know well.

Everyone loves a good villain. 

From Emperor Palpatine to Lord Voldemort, Hannibal Lector, and beyond, countless villains have stood the test of time to become classic fictional favorites. Love to hate ‘em or hate to love ‘em, I think it’s safe to say we want readers to feel just as passionately about the villains in our own stories. 

But how can we, as writers, craft antagonists that go beyond mere mustache-twirling and maniacal laughter to become the truly believable, bone-chilling villains we long for them to be? Let's dive deep into villainy in today's breakdown, writer!

We want readers to connect with our characters, to step inside their shoes and invest in their journeys.

But creating that easy connection between reader and character isn’t always a clear-cut process. Do our characters need to be, in some way, relatable for readers to connect with their stories? In my opinion, yes, but perhaps not in the way you might think.

Today, writer, let’s cut through the chaos and get straight to the point. If you want to encourage readers to invest in your characters' journeys, here are two key tips you don't want to miss!

The best friend. The sassy co-worker. The fellow thief on the crew.

Our stories’ sidekicks can come in all shapes and sizes, but the one thing that unifies them is their potential to aid our protagonists through the toughest times in their personal journeys — and maybe create a little secondary tension along the way! 

With such strong purposes to serve, one would think that crafting sidekicks would be a cinch, but it’s not often that a truly sensational right-hand character finds their way onto the pages of a book. So, how can you ensure that your protagonist's sidekick adds real and memorable value to your story? Let’s break down my top tips today, writer!