Readers don’t care about exciting plot events as much as you think – they care about what happen to the characters. If your characters are the dullest people on earth, however… They might not even finish reading your story.
In this post, we’re specifically talking about the protagonist and any other characters that have major airtime in your story, not random characters who deliver the post and say exactly one dad joke in the entire manuscript. You don’t need to carefully craft every single soul who goes through your story, just the ones who have something to do with your plot.
Related reading: The real way to write character flaws – The trick to making your characters do anything you want – Creating conflict in your story
What makes a character boring?
Let’s be clear here: A boring character isn’t someone who does or likes things that you don’t care about. If you like cars, a character who likes horses isn’t inherently boring. A 12-year-old reading a second-chance romance novel about middle-aged people might find the adult characters boring if they have no concept of adult life and adult problems.
A character is boring when they’ve got nothing going on for them and they’re not in any way distinguishable from other people or from a cardboard cutout. They’re also boring if they’re too polished and if they just slide through their world without any friction and you can see exactly where things will end up.
But hey, maybe you did craft an epically interesting character but you just failed to effectively convey their epicness to your readers. You just told them, but they have no reason to believe you.
Remember to SHOW what your characters are like, not just tell
The thing with characters is that you can’t just say what they’re like. You can’t just say that your character is a real hot-head who always gets in arguments with strangers, and then have her go grocery shopping and get her nails done and generally live her life with no incidents and expect us to believe you.
Think of people you know in real life. Do you think someone is a lovely person just because someone said they were, or do you have some kind of proof about it? It’s the same thing with characters – we need to see the proof. Yes, it’s more work, but it’s better writing.
Now that you know all that, we can get to making your characters un-boring.
1: Choose character flaws that matter
A character flaw or a weakness is a personality trait (or perhaps a lack of skill) that has a negative effect on the person’s life, and it also needs to be something that you can have a choice about at least on some level.
So for example, “being too beautiful” is not really flaw because people would find it hard to believe it has any real negative consequences, and also it’s not something you truly have a choice about. Being a really grumpy person, however, could annoy and alienate people, and you COULD choose to be nicer and brighter. Therefore, that’s a real flaw.
There are flaws that hurt other people and flaws that hurt the person themselves, and it’s good to have both kinds. If a character only has flaws that hurt other people, your readers might not care about that asshat at all, and if they only hurt themselves, they’ll seem like a pathetic wet mitten.
The flaws need to be relevant to THIS story
I talk about this in depth about my post on character flaws, but since we’re talking about crafting characters who aren’t boring, you need to know that the flaws you choose have to be relevant to the specific story you’re writing. That’s why you can’t just randomly pick them from a character flaws list and then pin them on your characters.
Flaw isn’t necessarily a flaw in every environment, so make your story the environment where your character is really forced to face these flaws that get in their way. These flaws also create friction, which is crucial for your plot. If your characters just do stuff without anything getting in the way, that’s not a story, that’s a grocery list.
2: Don’t make your characters too awesome, lucky and successful
I know we talked about flaws just a second ago, but I can’t emphasise enough how uninteresting it is if your character is this really lucky and successful dude who’s got everything going right for him in his huge mansion, inhabited by his flawlessly beautiful family. We don’t care about this guy. Write about someone else.
No, your characters don’t all have to be unlucky sad-sacks either, but everyone even remotely interesting should have something going against them. Bad habits, hidden secrets, bitter children plotting for their murder… Something. And you need to show the evidence of it as soon as possible. Give your readers a sense that something is bubbling under the surface.
Can you still write about that awesome guy living in his mansion? Of course, but don’t spend too long before showing that something is a little off or about to go wrong. If it takes a long time for things to go south, you should first reconsider if you really need to start your story so soon. In rare cases, starting a story with a flash-forward from the middle of the disaster can keep your readers intrigued long enough.
Mind you, this mostly applies to the characters that your story is about, like I said earlier. It’s fine if your protagonist’s sister who doesn’t have much to do with the plot is perfect in every way.
Now, you still have to have something good about your character so that we have a reason to root for them that isn’t just pity, and that’s what you get in the next section.
3: Make your character competent, not perfect
You now know that your character can’t just be all super, but it’s also not interesting if they’re 100% normal everyday people who are just like everyone else. It’s a balance.
So how do you make your character good enough to be interesting but not too perfect? Well, you just make them competent at something. We LOVE reading about competent characters. It’s fun to be taken on a journey with someone who’s somehow more than we are.
The best thing is that it could literally be anything, like maybe they’re freakishly good at guessing people’s favourite books or they’re just really, really funny. On the other hand, he could also be the best detective in town or she could be the most powerful wizard in her deadly magic school.
If you can use your own skills and knowledge here, that would be amazing, but doing research is also an option. YouTube is a fantastic resource for learning about real people doing things that they’re good at, but memoirs are also a good source for this if you can find the right ones.
Superman vs everyman
If you were writing about a superhero type of character, or someone who’s a total girl-next-door, how do you keep them interesting? How do you balance their flaws and competencies?
Fortunately, it’s easy. If you’ve got a character who’s practically a superhero, you give them something totally normal and pedestrian to struggle with, like a bad back or a fear of spiders. You want your readers to be like “Ah, that character might be practically supernatural, but they struggle with the same garbage as everyone else!”
And if your character is totally ordinary, you give them something that’s NOT ordinary. I don’t necessarily mean something supernatural like clairvoyance, although that could be fun in the right genre, but just make them somehow more than your regular person. It could be a competency liked we talked about above, but they could just be really witty or almost unnaturally observant. Just make them worth being written about.
4: Give your characters real problems
The extent of the problems in your story depends on your genre, because obviously a middle-grade story about bullying doesn’t have the same problems as a novel about zombies. But still, the problems should be real problems to the character who’s experiencing them, even if they wouldn’t be real problems to you or to your readers.
And how do you recognise a real problem? It should be something that can’t be solved straight away. This should be obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times someone has told me about their story’s plot and there are literally no significant obstacles on their way. Don’t let that be your story. The main conflict of your story should be a significant problem, and then you slow down your protagonist with smaller conflicts and obstacles.
Again, a problem is a problem precisely because it can’t be solved straight away, otherwise it would just be a task. Someone’s task list is not interesting to read about. Either the solution should be hard to get to, or your character shouldn’t know what the solution is. And actually– Wait, this is so important it deserves its own paragraph.
AND ACTUALLY, if you want to write a genuinely interesting story, the solution to your protagonist’s big story problem shouldn’t be obvious to your characters OR to your readers. Readers love surprises. Your characters should earn the solutions to all their problems, and it’s the purpose of your plot to manufacture that.
Approaching story problems wrong can lead to plot holes
Dealing with your story’s main conflict wrong is the source of many plot holes, so you want to do it right. There are two ways you could be messing up your story’s problems: Either it doesn’t make any sense to your readers why this is a problem, or the solution to the problem comes out of nowhere.
I tell you everything you need to know in my post about plot holes and you can write an amazing bullet-proof story with my Plot Without Holes workbook, so do check them out after reading this post. Just remember that it needs to be a real problem to your character, you need to show WHY it’s a real problem that doesn’t have an immediate solution, and then make your character earn the solution to the problem.
5: Believable characters have misconceptions that affect their behaviour
A character who is always right is boring. A character who thinks they’re always right, but isn’t, is a lot more interesting.
Your character isn’t more likable if they never get anything wrong and if they can be completely honest about all their thoughts and feelings. It’s not just boring but also unrealistic. It’s just not how humans work, and that’s basically the only thing you need to know about psychology to write good characters.
Misconceptions can go under the category of flaws, but unlike things like stubbornness and impatience, it’s a universal thing that we can’t be aware of all our motivations for doing stuff and that we can’t be 100% honest of all our thoughts and feelings, not to other people and not even to ourselves. Again, that’s not how human brains work.
Then there are misconceptions about the world and about other people. Your mum telling you that only bad people eat hamburgers could stick with you your whole life. If you’ve always found money on the ground when you wear a green dress, you could be led to believe that fortune favours the emerald gown.
As with flaws, this stuff should be relevant to your story. And even better, you could use the story to correct those misconceptions, and it might take a while because people don’t like to change. That’s what your plot is for.
6: Make character change difficult
Ah, change. Sure, every now and then something happens that makes us see the error of our ways instantly, or perhaps turn for the worse, but usually, change takes time. Our brains don’t like it.
So what does this have to do with boring characters? Well, if your character has a misconception, a flaw or a problem, and then they get over it or solve it Just Like That (imagine me snapping my fingers hear), it’s pretty boring and you cheat your readers out of a more interesting story. Don’t do that.
What do you think your plot is for, if not for making your characters go through stuff? Plot is, essentially, a change-making machine powered by problems, so don’t chicken out on the problems or the change.
7: Don’t put too much emphasis on backstory
Backstory is interesting when it brings contrast or irony to the actual story. For example, an ex-cop solving a crime isn’t nearly as interesting as an ex-nun solving a crime. If your story would work just fine without the backstory, leave it out.
Of course they can still mention stuff that has happened to them in the past and you don’t need to pretend they were born yesterday, I’m talking about crafting an elaborate past for your character and then assuming your readers need to come along for the ride. Again, does the backstory make your current story more ironic, more fun, more intriguing? If not, leave it out.
And really, if your character’s backstory is so goshdarn interesting, why don’t you write about THAT? The story that you’re writing now should be the most interesting stuff you could tell your readers, and if it isn’t, perhaps reconsider your premise, cowboy. (No idea why I called you cowboy but I assure you it was completely appropriate.)
Give your characters a plot that matters
There’s a lot that can be said about character creation, but my favourite thing to talk about is always plot. Obviously plot and character go hand in hand, but instead of giving you some kind of a character creation sheet, I’m just going to give you an easy way to map out your protagonist’s journey in one afternoon. A pretty sweet deal.
Protagonist Crafts is a blog about writing fiction, written by a published author and creative writing teacher. You can find more writing tips and inspiration in the blog and you can get the best author tools at Writer Lifestyle on Etsy.
