Making your hero and heroine relatable is key to creating characters your readers will care about, will laugh with, and will cry over. Your protagonists must also care about each other. They must have enough in common so that their attraction makes sense, but they also must have enough differences to create conflict.
How do we create characters who leap off the page and into our readers’ hearts?
Characters need to have:
- Relatability. Make them human, not perfect. Give them flaws, real character flaws, not just physical imperfections. I once edited a book by a man whose heroine was perfect. I told him she needed to have a flaw. “She does,” he assured me. “She has a limp.” A limp is not a flaw, it’s an imperfection. Being quick to judge is a flaw. Lying about inconsequential matters is a flaw. An inability to apologize is a flaw.
- Strong personalities. I’m a fairly passive introvert and my first drafts heroines are very much like me. In other words: boring. It’s in the rewrite that I figure out their personality and give them some sass and spunk. I’m in the process of doing that with my work-in-progress’s heroine. She’s still way too passive, but she’s getting there. I’ll often think of something outrageous that I would never do and force my heroine to do that. I’ve had characters go bungee jumping, sing karaoke, and appear on a reality television show.
- Conflict. Both within themselves and with each other. In my work-in-progress I’m pairing a hero with a strong sense of justice and honesty with a heroine who is intent on helping someone, but it means not telling the full truth. Instant conflict!
- Attraction. They need to have chemistry, which is easy to see, but hard to write and describe. I guess I’m a prude, because physical attraction is the hardest thing for me to write. Kissing scenes about kill me. I’m beyond grateful I don’t write sex scenes. But showing physical attraction between your protagonists is crucial to getting your readers to cheer them on to their happily ever after.
- Obstacles. Kind of like Conflict, but bigger, harder, more intense. Always be thinking, What can happen to keep this character from reaching his/her goal? What can I throw at them or put in their way? It can be anything from weather to mechanical to physical/geographical distance to family or work responsibilities to employer policies to those pesky personality differences.
- Authenticity. Nothing makes a reader lose interest in a book quicker than a character who does something unrealistic. I once read a “romance” where the hero gave the heroine not one clue that he was interested in a relationship. I was convinced that at the end, he’d give her an incredulous look and say, “Where did you get the idea I liked you, much less that we were dating?” and she would realize she’d made up the whole relationship in her head. Alas, he apologized for all the ways he’d failed her and promised to be a better boyfriend in the future. I instantly apologized to my heart for making it pump all the hours I’d wasted reading a book with zero plausibility.
Writing realistic and relatable characters is a skill worth learning. It’s the secret sauce that will turn your stories from good to can’t-put-down-able.
Carrie Padgett lives in Central California, close to Yosemite, but far from Hollywood, the beach, and the Golden Gate Bridge. She believes in faith, families, fun, and happily ever afters. She writes contemporary fiction with romance. She recently signed a contract with Sunrise Publishing to co-write a romance novel with New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hauck that will be published in 2022. Carrie and her husband live in the country with their high-maintenance cat and laid-back dog, within driving distance of their six grandchildren.
You can find her online at:
- Twitter: CarriePadgett
- Instagram: carpadwriter
- Facebook: WriterCarriePadgett
