Chances are one of the reasons you love it so much is that the main character (s) are people you like and want to spend time with. There are exceptions to this rule, I’d still read a book starring Darth Vader even though I wouldn’t want to have coffee with him*, but for the most part the story’s we love come parceled with characters we love.

So how do you make it work for you?

Behold, the five C’s of likeable characters:

Courageous:

We all admire great courage, whether it’s standing up to a bully, leaping in front of a train to save someone or intervening in a mugging, seeing someone defying their own fear is always inspiring.

Fear is the key word, no one cares about a character confronting epic dangers if that character is utterly invincible and knows they can’t fail.

If your protagonist is just an ordinary person, then courage might just mean refusing to be belittled by someone they know…for a special ops soldier the conditions under which they show true courage will be different (although it wouldn’t necessarily have to be combat).

Compassionate:

The vast majority of us appreciate seeing compassion or kindness of some kind in a main character. If there is a cat to be saved, we want the hero to save the cat. While it’s not a trait of all main characters (especially true anti heroes) a touch of compassion can swing a reader’s opinion on a character to the positive even if they’re not (yet) showing any of the other things I mention here.

Of course you can have the compassion come back and bite that character, and that can add to the conflict in your story (more conflict = good) as your character struggles between their natural instinct towards compassion vs the hard lessons they’ve had to learn.

Competent:

Despite the fact that sometime we resent people who are awesome at the things we want to be awesome at, there is always some admiration for people who are stunningly good at what they do.

Sherlock Holmes is a good example of a character who is often extremely unlikable, he’s rude, uncaring and a raging drug addict but he’s saved by the fact that he is just so damn good at deduction.

Also look at Batman, if you boil down his character you get a near psychopathic billionaire who dresses up in tights to battle criminals because of childhood trauma…but that doesn’t matter because he’s freaking Batman and he’s so good at…everything…we can’t help but admire him.

Just be careful to balance the character out, the awesome they are the more problems/hang ups/powerful enemies they need to have to oppose them.

Comical:

If your character can make your readers laugh, they’re already halfway to loving them. I don’t necessarily mean the character just tells jokes in the traditional sense, although that can be true too, anything form of humor can work.

This is particularly useful for characters who are otherwise a little shady, incompetent, or selfish, if the humor is there we’ll stick with the character while they grow into the other traits.

Conflict:

Your character has to fighting for something. It can be a literal fight for their lives or just a fight with an overbearing school teacher and anything in between. It can even be a fight with their own thoughts and feelings; internal conflict has provided some of the most memorable works of fiction the world has ever seen.

We grow through hardship, and it goes double for fictional characters. The more they’re put through, the more the readers will empathize with the character. Even though no reader has ever had to battle a demon from another reality* we’ve all been terrified of things that are out of our control or beyond our understanding and thus when the hero is desperately trying to pull of the impossible we empathize with the feelings they’re having.

Conclusion (once you start writing things beginning with C it’s hard to stop)

You don’t need to have all of these traits, but try to include at least one in your character to begin with and allow them to gain more of them as the story goes on (or, if your story need to take a darker turn; have them lose one).

In fact that may be the most important C thing of all: CHANGE.

I want your characters to change of the course of your novel, I want them to learn from their mistakes and their hardships and be affected by whatever it is they have to go through.

What do you think makes a character likeable? Let me know in the comments.

* I could be wrong about this.

Villains can be more fun to write, especially those that can find time in their day for an evil laugh, but more on those later.

Your protagonist says a lot about your story. Got a wise cracking, yet dark and powerful wizard as your main character (ala Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden) then chances are the tone of your book will be dark, intense with moments of levity spun into the work like hidden candy (can you tell I like the Dresden files?).

Is your protagonist more like Rincewind? Terry Pratchett’s bumbling wizard sets the tone for his books as being funnier and less introspective than Pratchett’s other protagonists, especially the aging Commander of the City Watch, Sam Vimes. The Vimes books are still funny, I don;t want to give you the wrong idea, but they;re not as light and breezy as the books where Rincewind stumbles from one disaster to the next.

I’m running up character history for my protagonist at the moment, and I’ve taken a hint from my old role playing days to do it. Every character that has more than a passing affect on the book gets their own character sheet. It details not only what they look like and what they’re good at, but little things. The main protagonist’s name is Michael Ginlink, and despite being a hardened former Army medic, he’s got a soft spot for animals of all kinds. His apartment contains three cats, a turtle, and iguana and a document chewing bird named Lizzie.

The animals may not have a great bearing on the novel, but no matter how bad things get for Michael (and they go south for him in a big way), that he will always look out for his pets, even over and above people, tells us more about his character than straight description can.

If you’re struggling to flesh out your protagonist, give this a try: put together a character sheet for them. Don’t just list their stats, get detailed. You should have at least two pages of history for your main two or three characters. You might never use this stuff, but the fact the the history is there will create tiny changes tot he way you write that will help the characters feel “real” to the reader. I’ll let you choose the big things, but try to answer these three things about your main character:

“What’s their favorite snack?”

“Favorite movie?”

“If they’re in trouble, and they can’t reach the person that they call in your book, who will they call?” (Chostbusters?)

“How much sleep do they get each night?”

“Favorite hot beverage?”

These small things can get left out while you’re doing the big things, so take a few minutes and answer these and another five little questions you make up yourself, you’ll end up with a more rounded character to show for it.