How do you create characters readers care about?

Jeffrey's answer

A character readers care about is a character with a contradiction.

Think of the people you actually love in life. They are not heroes. They are not villains. They are people who want one thing and fear another, who are brave on Tuesday and cowardly on Friday, who are kind to strangers and curt to their husbands. Real people are made of contradictions. Characters in novels who are made of consistencies — pure heroes, pure villains, pure innocents — are not characters. They are types. Readers do not care about types. They care about the woman who would do anything for her son and yet cannot quite bring herself to phone him on a Sunday.

Harvey Metcalfe — the villain of Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less — is the easiest example I can give you, because I made him myself, in 1974, in white-hot anger after I had been swindled. I did not want a man who twirled his moustache. I wanted a man who believed he was entitled. Entitled to win. Entitled to profit. Entitled to treat other people as stepping stones. He is not a monster. He is something far more recognisable: a successful man with a defective conscience who is, in his own mind, a hero. That is what makes him useful in fiction. The reader recognises him.

Miss Tredgold, in The Prodigal Daughter, is the opposite case. I did not plan her as the centre of the book. She walked onto the page in the second draft and politely refused to leave. By the fifth draft she was running it. That is what happens when a character has the right contradictions: they become more real than the writer expected, and the writer follows them where they go.

Many of my central characters are women, and that is not by accident. I married a remarkable woman — Mary, my wife of more than fifty years — and writers write about what they know. Powerful women are in all my books. They are in The Clifton Chronicles. They are in The William Warwick novels. They play a major role, sometimes seen, sometimes unseen. If I had married a wimp, I would have written about a wimp. I did not. So the women in my books are normally every bit equal to the men, or, if not, more impressive.

Do not make your protagonist your spokesperson. Give them a flaw the reader can see and they cannot. Give them a desire they cannot quite admit. Give them somebody to love and somebody to disappoint. And then — this is the most important thing — get out of their way.

A few practical notes

• Give them a contradiction. A brave person who is afraid of one specific thing. A kind person who can’t be kind to one specific person. Real people are made of contradictions; consistent characters read as types.
• Show them wanting something they can’t have. The desire is the engine — the reader watches them struggle for it across the book.
• Give them a flaw the reader can see and they cannot. Dramatic irony — when we know something the character doesn’t — creates investment.
• Write their backstory in detail. Most of it never reaches the page. But you must know what they ate for breakfast as a child, who they loved at 17. The detail you don’t write shapes the dialogue you do.
• Test the dialogue. Cover the character names in your manuscript. Can you tell who’s speaking from their words alone? If everyone sounds like the writer, every character is the same character.
• Avoid the Mary Sue / Marty Stu. A protagonist who is good at everything, beloved by everyone, and never wrong is unbearable to read.
• Ground them in a body. How do they sit? What do they do with their hands when they’re nervous? Physicality makes characters specific.
• Write women as fully as you write men. If your female characters exist mainly in relation to a male protagonist, you have a problem. Re-read with this lens; revise relentlessly.