Relatability has somewhat become a buzzword in recent years, but is writing “relatable characters” as important as it seems? In this post, we’re going to talk about what it means for a character to be relatable, why it matters and how you can do it well in your own writing.
Relatable Related reading: The right way to write character flaws – How to write stories that people want to read
What does “relatable” mean anyway?
Before we start talking about relatable characters, we need to understands what this mysterious “relatability” means. According to Merriam-Webster, relating to someone or something is about being able to understand, like or have sympathy because of similarities to yourself or to your own experiences.
In other words, it’s not about being exactly like someone, it’s about being able to draw connections between a character and yourself. It’s not just about what the character is like, but also about what they’ve gone through or are going through. It does have to be something that is already true and not something that theoretically could happen.
What you DON’T need for relatable characters
As an occasional romance reader, I’ve noticed that modern romance heroines are not just blond, buxom and flawless, but they’re physically described to be more “normal”. That is, of course, FINE on its own, but some people seem to have this misconception that it’s enough to write a female protagonist who has brown, unmanageable hair and a complex about the size of her bottom and you can start calling her relatable without working on her actual character.
As we’ll talk about in this post, different people will find different things relatable – even in the same character – but you can’t just glue brown frizzy hair on your character and hope it’s enough. It’s also kind of unrealistic for all people who look different to be different in all other ways too, you know?
Next, a relatable character doesn’t need to have the same life as you have. As a neurodivergent person who doesn’t have a normal day job and who has never been a fan of doing things the way you’re supposedly supposed to do them, I probably won’t relate to a lot of stories about 37-year-old mums living in small towns even though I am a 37-year-old mum living in a small town at the time of writing this post. It’s not because I don’t ever relate to my actual peers, but because those stories are rarely about the things that matter to me personally or about things that I struggle with, I might just relate to a teenager that goes to a deadly magic school instead.
You also don’t need to agree with everything that a “relatable character” does or think that they’re a good person. If you’re embarrassed about finding a murderous character relatable, you don’t have to tell anyone about it, but it doesn’t make the character less relatable to you.
I could probably list a million things here, but in essence, a character doesn’t need any specific thing to be relatable, but it definitely needs to be about more than just surface level. We’re hopefully beyond watching Paw Patrol and saying “That pink one is me!”
Do characters NEED to be relatable?
By now you might be wondering, do characters really have to be relatable? Can’t we enjoy reading about them anyway? And the answer is that all your characters don’t have to be relatable, but it’s good if at least some of them are. However, you do need to understand what relatability actually means, and know that people have been writing relatable characters for eons without actually thinking “oh I need to make sure this character is relatable”. It just kind of happens when you use real-life experiences in your writing.
It might be easy to think that characters that you want people to like should be relatable and that characters who you want people to dislike should not, but it isn’t that simple. People are constantly relating to characters who they claim are “unlikable”, and it’s very common to be annoyed at characters and real people who do the exact kind of stupid stuff as you do. Just ask your mum.
With all that being said… you can’t control what your readers will find relatable, so it would be basically impossible to say which character is not relatable for anyone at all. Also, there are many ways to make your readers care about your characters and there’s no reason to be solely focused on relatability.
Characters are not like influencers
Have you heard of youtubers or influencers becoming famous for being totally relatable, and then becoming unrelatable as soon as they’ve got money to buy that big house and expensive car? It’s not the same thing for characters.
I know some people have the misconception that a character needs to be exactly like you to be relatable, but as we already know, that isn’t true. Because we can spy on the inner happenings of characters and we’re not just seeing their polished veneers, we get to witness something that internet people generally don’t show us. A socially awkward millionaire can be a relatable character even if they wouldn’t be a relatable internet persona.
The balance between being extraordinary and being human
Here’s another thing you need to consider. When you’re writing a character who’s somehow extraordinary, like a superhero or someone who’s the very best at something, you also need to show them being just like everyone else in some way. For example, El in the Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik is extremely good at destructive magic and burning down anything on her path, but she also has a history of being mistreated and she’s stubbornly repeating that pattern through her own actions until she makes friends who kick some sense into her.
What about when you’re writing about someone totally normal? A regular high school kid or a suburban dad? You need to make them extraordinary in some way, somehow MORE than your regular person. Maybe they’re funnier than anyone else, or more observant, or just really good at something that hasn’t made them a superstar but that will come in handy at some point in the story. That’s one of the reasons why we like watching TV shows like Bones where there’s a group of people working together towards a common cause – they all get to be regular and occasionally relatable people who also happen to be really good at something. (For Hodgins, that something happens to be bugs and slime.)
Why do you have to do this? Because “superhero” type of characters are hard to connect with without any human characteristics, while really normal people are not interesting to read about. It’s all about balance.
When characters are secretly relatable
Regular readers are not always great at analysing stories or understanding their own thoughts and feelings about literature, so you’ll hear them say stuff like “This character is not likeable at all, yet I care about them! Strange!” That’s because they have fallen into the relatability trap carefully crafted by the writer.
We’re not always rooting for characters because we relate to them, because sometimes we just feel for them. You can want the orphan to find a new family even if you’ve never been orphaned and lost yourself. But when you read about a complete trainwreck of a person stumbling about and making mistakes, you might just relate to them if you first read about them being bullied by their father just like you were, even if you think they’re so unlikable.
Good writers know what they’re doing. It’s not an accident that you root for a character and care about them. So don’t be like the average reader – analyse different kinds of characters that you enjoy reading about or watching on the screen, and see how many of them actually have characteristics or experiences that you can relate to. Maybe do the same with characters you find totally annoying as well.
Do your characters have to be relatable for *everyone*?
I’ve already talked about this earlier in this post, but let’s reiterate it here: You can’t write a character who everyone will find relatable because different people will relate to different things.
The good news is that stories generally have more than one character, so you’ve got plenty of opportunities for having your readers relate to the people who populate your story’s world. It’s always a good idea to have a variety of different characters anyway because you don’t want their roles to overlap too much, so when you’re planning your characters, “Who will relate to this?” can be one of the questions you ask yourself.
Complex characters are loved by different kinds of people
I’m going to talk about Bones again because it’s on the background while I’m writing this post, and also because it’s a really good TV show.
The show’s protagonist Temperance Brennan might be unrelatable to a lot of people in the sense that she’s a genius and she’s the best in her field. Not many of us can say that. But here are other things about her that other people can find relatable:
- she’s proud of the things she does well but not everyone likes that
- it’s never stated in the show, but she’s obviously autistic and frequently struggles with neurotypical relationships
- she has a complicated relationship with her father and her brother
- she might be successful now, but she wasn’t liked in school
- she thinks almost every authority figure is a dumbass
- she likes to see things done properly at the workplace and in general
Can you think of different people in your life who might relate to some of those things? Probably, so approach your own characters in the same way. And hey, even if there’s nothing relatable there for someone, there’s always Booth or Angela. Your story will have different characters too and therefore new opportunities for relatability.
General doesn’t equal relatable
Got a character with A Job? Siblings, even, and Parents? Who live in a House? Wow, so relatable! Except… not really.
Yes, “this could happen to anyone” is an important element of some types of stories, but it doesn’t make a story widely relatable. Ever wondered how we can relate to fantasy world characters even when nobody is actually a mage? It’s because we actually find the universal in the specific.
Being disrespected by someone you thought was your friend hurts the same way whether the friend in question is a human or a gnome. Always losing your car keys is a similar experience to always losing your sonic screwdriver. What is the crux of the thing that you’re writing about? That’s what matters, not the form.
But if it’s the crux that matters, why can’t we just say “she was mistreated and thus very, very sad”? Because that doesn’t feel like anything. When you’re writing a novel, you want your readers to feel like they’re really inside your story, not like they’re hearing a summary of what happened from a third party. You also don’t want to explain things to your readers because they’re more than capable of drawing their own conclusions from the stuff that you actually show them happening.
Your experiences makes your writing AI-proof
You don’t need to write a memoir or biofiction to use your own experiences in your writing. For example, when I started drafting one of my novels (that I’m currently querying – fingers crossed) I gave my protagonist everything that I disliked about myself at that time. I wasn’t going to invent some kind of a random unpleasant person, I wanted to show exactly what you can turn into when you have the kind of upbringing that me and the character had.
Large language models don’t have experiences, they’re just mathematical guessing machines that give you answers that look like what you asked for while regurgitating existing, usually stolen material. When you take advantage of your own experiences, thoughts and feelings and give them to your characters, you get something far bigger and better than when someone presses a button on the Average Machine.
So what do readers actually find relatable?
Although I can’t give you the answer to “What does everyone find relatable?” because the answer doesn’t exist, I CAN give you some advice for what kind of things can generate that feeling of relatability.
Nobody relates to perfection
Like it or not, the stuff that people usually find relatable is not all sunshine and rainbows. If your character has the perfect life and they do everything right and generally experience the world in a very fun, chill way, that’s unfortunately not someone that people will enjoy reading about. We don’t care about perfect people, they don’t make up for interesting stories.
Some characters might be more aspirational than others, especially if they’re the love interest of a more relatable character, but nobody should be perfect with no sharp edges anywhere. That’s just boring to read and we can’t connect to that. (See: what we talked earlier about superheroes.)
Flaws that we have too
Character flaws are important for storytelling because they affect how the character acts in the world which has an effect on the plot. However, since we’re talking about writing relatable characters here, it’s good to know that the right character flaws can also make your character relatable.
Just remember that people in general aren’t very self-aware of the things that are “wrong” with them unless they’re going to therapy, so just saying that your character sabotages all their relationships isn’t necessarily immediately relatable to a reader who also sabotages their relationships. That’s why you need to show these flaws in action or else they’re not flaws at all. Real flaws need to have consequences.
Shared experiences
Shared experiences are a great way to get your readers to relate to your characters, and as we’ve already discussed, the specifics don’t need to match exactly. It’s about how it feels like and what it means.
The first day at a new school can feel similar to the first day at a new job, but you know what? I started karate recently, and going to my first class ALSO felt similar to starting at a new school. Fortunately it felt nothing like gym class, however, or else I wouldn’t have returned.
Since we’re talking about relatable characters and not just events, you do need to consider how your character acts in these situations and how do they think and feel. Anyone can go to a job interview – it’s the stumbling through it and mispronouncing your own name that could make it relatable for someone.
Shared struggles
Success isn’t kind of unrelatable just because we’re jealous, it’s because failure is more common and statistically more likely to have happened to your readers. Yes, even the successful ones! It doesn’t mean that we’re all losers, but it’s a fact of life that you need to fail a lot before you can be successful and many of us are still yet to get there. We might want to read about aspirational people on social media and in nonfiction, but not in our stories.
So, struggles. They’re much more relatable. You don’t want to have your character JUST struggling or talking about past struggles, because nobody wants to read about a sad-sack either with no way to improve their conditions, so you’ll want to show your character trying to get out of their struggles, at least at the point of the story when they turn proactive.
Struggling to fit in, embarrassing yourself in front of someone you have a crush on, not having the lifestyle you wish you had, being given a bigger burden than you can carry, getting betrayed by your best friend… There are many kinds of struggles that any character in any environment could face, so don’t feel like your magical characters should be restricted to magical problems.
Reactions to good things
You don’t actually have to have only bad things happening to your character for them to be relatable, because life is more complex that good vs. bad stuff.
I haven’t yet purchased the house of my dreams, but I listen to the podcast of someone who has, and she said that although it was a dream come true for her, she was also so anxious. It was so much money! And she suddenly had to learn to do all kinds of new things! Agh! I can definitely relate to that as a very anxious creature.
More than likely, good things have also happened to your readers, but all things have different sides and different consequences. Show the nausea on the first day at your character’s dream job, how they overthink after a wonderful date and worry about getting mugged after winning the lottery.
People in our lives
Have you ever had an annoying coworker? I’ve been self-employed almost for ten years now, but I can still remember that one older nurse at the ward I last worked at who loved bitching about everyone else to me specifically even though I never want to talk about coworkers or friends behind their backs. I don’t know why I was targeted, but I’m certain that I’m not the only one something like this has happened to.
What’s your best friend like? Mine is a complete menace to society, and if she ever gets near any liquid, she WILL spill it on my coffee table and/or on herself. I love her to death anyway and I miss the coffee mug rings she used to leave everywhere because I haven’t seen her since last Christmas after she moved to Berlin.
I didn’t tell you these fun little anecdotes just to increase the word count of this post, but because I wanted you to see that we all have different “types” of people in our lives. When we turn those people into characters – especially when it’s characters in your protagonist’s life – it can make everything in your story a lot more relatable.
How to make your characters relatable in your story
It’s fine to know the theory, but how do you actually DO all this to your characters and your story?
It starts with character creation
To make sure your characters end up relatable to the extent you want them to, you need to plan these characters before you let them loose. Yes, your characters will often reveal themselves to you as you write them, because no matter how well you plan any aspect of your story, writing is still an organic process with its share of surprises, but if you want your characters to be relatable, you need to plan for that relatability in advance.
However, it’s up to you how you want to do that planning. I have all kinds of wonderful character creation tools in my Etsy shop, but personally I see my characters so easily in my head that I just free-write some stuff about them in my notebook and then they’re ready. (The setting and the plot are the things for me that I need to plan more in detail on paper.)
Although your characters will and should have a physical form, their appearance is basically irrelevant here. Remember, their dishwater brown hair isn’t what makes them relatable. Focus on things that has consequences, whether that’s stuff that has happened to them or an annoying personality quirk.
Show your characters in action
Now that you’ve got your character who did badly in school and who’s way too impatient to think before she acts, you can’t just state those things and expect your character to be relatable.
Is your character impatient? Show them mess something up because they couldn’t make themselves listen through the instructions. Does she always get into strange situations because she just can’t say no? Actually put an event like that on the page.
Especially when you’re shooting for relatability, you need to remember that everything can mean something different to different people. Someone might not think they’re impatient, but they might have experience in screwing things up because the instruction manual had too many pages and the tutorial video took too long to load. That’s why you can’t expect your readers to just take your word for it – SHOW US what your characters are like so that we can relate to them.
How to plot your relatable character’s story
How do you put your interesting and relatable character through interesting and relatable shenanigans now? You plot them a story that lets them show their best and worst sides to your readers. Terrifying for them, exciting for you.
Although I have tons of tools and resources for creating an amazing plot, why not get started with this 3-page Simple Plotter? It could be your starting point or it could be all you need, and I’m giving it to you for free.
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.
