Your characters are the focal point of your book, but for many authors they don't get nearly the time and thought that they deserve. The outcome is a book that might have a great idea, story arc and plot, but with characters that are completely unbelievable and ultimately a story that isn't fun to read but that you can't quite put your finger on why. If you're finding your characters don't come to life on the pages or you're starting your next novel and want to avoid common pitfalls this article is for you!
So let me know if you've heard this one before, you send your book out to your beta readers, and the number one piece of feedback you get is that your characters feel one dimensional, or flat. I know I've gotten this exact feedback before, and what's worse, my readers can never tell me exactly why they feel that way.
The good news is that this is a well-known issue and it can be solved. A character feeling one-dimensional can stem from a number of causes:
Issue 1. They don't have enough back story
If a character is dropped on the page with little or no background about who they are, they're going to feel more like an actor in your novel than a proper character. That's not to say you should launch immediately into their life story as soon as they hit the page - in fact I'm saying you should absolutely not do that! But you should sprinkle some of their backstory through the novel as you're writing. Maybe your character has an aversion to bees because they stepped on a beehive as a kid. Maybe your protagonist loves cotton candy cause their Mom took them to the town fair each year before she passed and it reminds them of her. These details make your characters feel real, and only require a sentence or two to get right.
Issue 2. Your Characters are variants of you
Many authors take inspiration from themselves because you are who you know best! The problem with that is, unless you are writing a book about a writer, your characters aren't going to be very realistic or very interesting. One of the toughest things we do as writers is impersonate someone we're not. The hardest character I had to portray as an adult man living in a city was a teen girl named Amaryll, an elf who lived in a forest village under constant threat of attack and capture by humans. To say we couldn't be more opposite is an understatement. Had I written her as I sound, it would have been about as believable as the used-car salesman.
While I will be the first to say don't let research get in the way of progress, you should take at least a few minutes to understand the character personas you are building and how they speak, and act. Ten minutes of prep today saves hours of revision tomorrow.
Issue 3. Characters feel cookie-cutter
If you aren't writing the characters as versions of yourself, you may fall victim to the trap of writing a generic character with a single personality trait differentiating them. For example, your character might be George, the man who knows knots, and he comes in clutch when it's time to tie off the raft to the dock, but otherwise has no skills or personality.
Another common issue that authors run into is leaning too heavily into stereotypes to try to make their characters sound different, leading to them all sounding the same but with annoying or worse, offensive traits (think of the generic "valley girl" trope)
Issue 4. Characters are perfect and have no flaws
So you wrote your characters well, they have distinct personalities and voices, and they are all great. Too Great. Oftentimes, you, as the author, will cast your characters to be idealized versions of the real world. Sometimes you do this because you want the character to be likable. Other times, it's because you believe the hero shouldn't have flaws. But just as Superman has kryptonite, your character needs flaws.
Your character flaws don't have to be too extreme; they can simply be something as easy as a character shuts down in confrontation, or pushes people away when they get too close, or maybe they grew up in a rough neighbourhood and associated with the wrong crowd and have a criminal background. These things don't make your character unlikable; they make them real and human.
My only advice when choosing a flaw for your character is that if you bring it up in an intentional way, make sure it doesn't become Chekhov's gun. You don't want your reader waiting to find out how your characters' gang ties come in, only to be let down.
The key is that the flaw has to be real, and that's where a lot of writers stumble in the opposite direction.
Issue 5. Flaws that aren't really flaws
That said, don't make your characters' issues effectively a non-issue. Nothing is more frustrating to a reader than a character whose only flaw is that they just care too much. This may seem easy to avoid but it's shockingly easy to slip in, and your novel will suffer for it. Imagine for example, you have a single mother with two children working two jobs and keeping house. This character is incredibly relatable to many parents, but if you write them as managing all of this like it's nothing and when questioned, she simply says, "I just care about my kids," it's going to come off fake, unless later you cut to her breaking down, exhausted, or even snapping at those same children.
The goal should always be to make your character's flaws fit the story and also be genuine. A reader who can see parts of themselves in a character is far more likely to connect with them and enjoy your novel.
Issue 6. Characters are too extreme to force the audience to feel a certain way
But say you don't want your character to be likable, say you want to make sure your audience hates the character. Authors are often tempted to layer on the bad acts for their characters: say the villain evicts the single mother, then he yells at her kids, and, just in case he wasn't despicable enough, he kicks a puppy on the way back to his car. While this character is certainly awful, the more pieces you add on to make him that way, the less believable the character becomes, and instead of being shocked, your reader ends up rolling their eyes.
Instead, let the actions your characters take stand for themselves. Evicting a single mother from her home is a very cruel act and your novel likely needs no further evidence for your audience to side with the mother. Let the simple act stand on its own and trust your readers to connect the dots.
Issue 7. Characters who exist only to serve the plot
When you are in the depths of writing your novel, you will often think, "It would be great if I had a character that could do X," and then your impulse will be one of two things:
You will have your characters magically have this ability. or
You will invent a character from thin air that fills this role
And this isn't just related to skills like picking a lock, you will find yourself doing this in cases where you need a bully, or where you need the police to find a character in distress. These invented characters are ok if they end up staying in your plot and serving an important role, however if they only ever appear in a single scene to serve one single purpose, it might be wise to cut these characters and find another path forward.
Issue 8. Inconsistent characterization
This last point is the one that you will almost certainly run into the most, is the hardest to spot, and can be the worst for breaking your reader's immersion. Say you have a character - Betty - she is short, and has brown hair and green eyes. Three chapters later you describe Betty looking in the mirror her deep green eyes staring back at her. The reader is immediately going to pause and want to flip back to the previous reference to confirm you did in fact just change her eye colour. Now instead of enjoying your novel, your reader is going to be watching for other inconsistencies and will feel your novel is not polished.
Whenever you make a character, make a document for them and outline their attributes - eye colour, hair colour, build, the spelling of their name, and any attributes you give them. This can become your story bible and will save you hours poring over your novel looking for inconsistencies.
Keeping track of all of this manually is exactly as tedious as it sounds — which is why we built a character bible directly into QuillLoop. At-tag any character mid-draft and their details pop up instantly, so consistency stops being something you have to think about.
By avoiding these 8 issues you are not only avoiding hours of revision later, but also preventing the dreaded feedback from your beta readers saying "Hey, your characters feel a little flat" And remember, the only difference between a dreamer and an author is the tap of keys or the stroke of a pen.
