How to Get Readers to Love Your Characters

Make your characters stand out from the crowd

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

In last week’s post, we discussed how empathy can help us understand characters' thoughts and feelings. Today, we’re continuing that thought by demonstrating how understanding characters’ thoughts and feelings will help your audience identify with them.

Character development is important because if you know nothing about each character other than how they look and what happens to them in the story, your characters will seem wooden. If your characters do seem wooden, here are a few ways that I flesh out my characters.

Develop Character Backstory

You must love your characters, even the nasty, evil ones. This is where backstory comes in handy, as you have to have a vested interest in their situation. What made this person the way they are?

In my first book When God Turned His Head, John Codman was a psychopath of a man who had married his indentured servant woman. Were there mitigating circumstances that brought about his insensitivity to his wife, Drusilla? There were several. His father had been a very controlling man who only found fault in his son. His first wife and children died in an epidemic while he was at sea a thousand miles away. He had taken Drusilla in as an…