How to Write Loveable, Memorable Characters Part 2: Creating Sympathy

Check out part one here.

Storytellers say that conflict is the substance of all stories, but I disagree. I say that plot and conflict are meaningless if the audience doesn't care about what happens to your characters. 

Great characters are the heart and soul of any great story. Without them - we'll just be staring at the screen, feeling nothing. 

How do we make the audience care about our characters?  

In order to make the audience care about our character, we need to make them sympathize with the character. To sympathize means to build an emotional connection to the character. This is what will keep our eyes glued to the screen (or book).   

Two common mistakes people make when trying to establish sympathy are:

• They try to make their character as detailed as possible. They think that by making their character ultra detailed, the audience will find the character more realistic and hence relate to them better. In reality, filling your character with superficial traits will only make them flatter than a pancake.
• They make their character over-the-top miserable: "Jim lost both his parents, has no money to support himself, struggles to find a job, sucks at life and has an incurable genetic disease. Yeh, don't do that... Instead it's better to focus on one of these traits and go into great depth.

So how do we create sympathy properly? 

There are numerous ways a writer can establish an emotional connection to the audience:

Some have proposed that giving your characters a flaw to overcome will make them more sympathetic. Others have proposed that a strong sense of justice will make us root for the character. 

These methods are all great and they all clearly work, but when I was writing my visual novel, I felt that these methods alone weren't enough. I found that the best method for me personally was to create a void within the character.

I did this by withdrawing certain needs or wants from a character - make them missing something from their lives, be it food, warmth, shelter or compassion, esteem, potential.

Take a look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs for more information:

Image Source

We've all felt loneliness before, no matter how popular we may be.  We've also felt hopeless and loss at some point in our lives - we've all experienced failure at something, despite giving our best efforts. 

These experiences are universal to humans. Creating this void will make the audience immediately relate to the character, because they share a common humanity. The audience will feel for the character and start rooting for them to win.

This is different from a goal, because it's usually less specific and the character doesn't actively pursue it like a goal. An example of a goal would be: 'to escape from prison,' something the character acts on. On the other hand, an example of a 'void' would be 'lack of freedom,' something which might just be there, but the character doesn't need to pursue it. There could be three reasons for this:

• Pursuing the void is futile and they've accepted to live with it
• They don't know that the void exists. They mindlessly pursue another goal, thinking it'll make them happy when in fact, filling the void brings true happiness.
• And finally: they must pursue other priorities (like the classic 'abandon love for justice' theme which usually appears in detective movies).

A character who always gets bad grades no matter how hard he/she tries will always be more empathetic than a character who's goal is to simply get good grades. Audiences can relate to this 'lack of potential' and will start rooting for the character to succeed.

Some of my favorite examples are:

Image Sources: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

 

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