Weekly Writing Memo: 3 Ways to Make Your Audience Care

In last week’s memo, we answered the question “What do I write?” This week we’re going to talk about making your audience care about your story. If your audience isn’t invested in the story, if they aren’t interested in it, then they aren’t going to want to stick with it through to the end. Lack of investment is what makes people walk out of theaters mid-screening and give up on books before they get to the end of the story.

So how do you get your audience invested? How do you make people care?

As with everything else to do with writing, there isn’t a guide to follow or a cheat sheet to guarantee your audience will care, but there are several steps you can take to give your story the best odds.

1. Make your characters rounded and “real.”

It’s hard for people to get invested in characters that are flat or stereotypes. The more rounded your character, the more depth that they have, the more they will feel like real people. Without characters that are more than just a stereotype or shell to carry out the plot, it’ll be incredibly hard to get an audience invested in the story.

Even in real life it’s hard to get invested in people we don’t know, or people who are theoretical to us. We often think of people as the role they fill in our lives—the barista who makes your coffee, the cop who gave you a ticket, the taxi driver, the security guard. It isn’t until we learn something about them that is personal—a habit, their family, their hobbies, etc—that those people become something more to us than their jobs. Friends and family mean more to us because we have a wealth of experiences with them, and knowledge about them as people, that give them meaning to us. Characters in stories need to create these same feelings

Without the depth to your characters, the audience will never be able to think of them as more than functions. There are a lot of ways to create deep characters, and it’s different for every story. My past blog posts on Making Likable Characters and 5 Tips for Establishing Characters are good places to start. Essentially, it comes down to making your characters real.

Give them more backstory than what pertains to the plot. It doesn’t all have to be explained, but do hint at it and let glimmers shine through to show that there’s more going on beneath the surface. Give your characters habits, and families, and favorites/dislikes. Give them personality, and let it shine in their narration, their dialogue, and their actions. The more “real” you can make your character, the more depth you can give them, the easier it will be for people to get invested in them enough to want to stick around through the entire story.

2. Create a plot that matters.

Having a character with depth is only the first part. If the character doesn’t have a conflict that is interesting, something that matters, then even if the character is well done, the story itself may not be interesting. The plot of your story has to have something major at stake for your protagonist, and the story should have different levels of plot to create more depth (Read 3 Types of Plot for more info on plot levels).

The plot of the story has to have something at stake for the protagonist that anyone in those shoes would see as life altering. This can be anything from their life being at risk to their one chance at finding true love. If you show that it is something pivotal for your protagonist, then your audience will look at it with the same mindset.

You want your audience to care about what is happening in the story, so the protagonist has to care about it and SHOW that they care. They can’t just say “well if I don’t get this job I’ll have nothing.” You have to show how not getting that job will ruin their life—show their financial situation, show their potential future without the job, show them starving and spending their last dollar. If you make the audience understand the consequences of the protagonist failing to succeed in the story, then you will make the audience understand why the conflict of the plot is so important to the protagonist. You’ll make the plot matter, and get your audience invested.

3. Ask questions that your audience wants answered.

Every scene of your writing should create a question that your audience is wondering. Where is the protagonist going? Who died? Who’s the murderer? What is going to happen next? These questions are what keep your audience invested and curious to keep reading because they want the answers. The only time your audience should have all the answers, or close to, is at the end of the story, and that is only true if the story is not a series of some sort.

Every scene of your story should, at the very least, lead your audience to ask themselves “what will happen next?” If not, then the scene is not driving the story forward. Scenes that do not drive the story forward have no purpose in the story and will most likely feel boring, slow, and will often be places where the audience stops paying attention. They lose their investment in the story because they have no reason to keep reading.

You can create more “questions” in the story by making sure your scenes don’t give all the answers to the plot, by adding conflict, and by letting your characters and the plot be exposed gradually rather than in bulks of exposition.

For example, instead of doing a chunk of dialogue or exposition about who your protagonist is, let your audience figure it out as the story develops. Give them doses, enough to keep them curious about the character, but don’t spell it all out for the audience. That keeps the audience asking “who is this character?” If you can keep your audience asking questions, you’ll most likely keep them reading to find the answers.

Final Notes:

The one thing to keep in mind about all of the tips above is that they are all useful in moderation. You can tell us too much about a character, make a plot too complicated, or create too many questions for your audience. You want to give your audience enough to keep them interested and entertained, enough for them to understand the story, but not so much that they are overwhelmed, bored, or confused.

Some great popular examples of too much of something are Lost and Game of Thrones. When Lost was on, many people complained because it constantly created questions for the audience without giving enough answers. Similarly, in Game of Thrones many complain because there are too many characters and audiences had trouble getting into the story.

Now, both of those franchises are highly successful so clearly people can get past those things, but both show the dangers of too much of something. Both of those series, however, also use all of the things I listed above to keep audiences invested. They have deep characters with backstory beyond the events of the core plot that the audience sees. They keep the audience asking questions and wanting answers, and their plots have huge things at stake for the characters.

You’ll never be able to keep everyone invested all of the time, but if you strive for balance, and create deep, meaningful characters and plot, then you should be able to keep your audience invested in the story.

Weekly Writing Memo: Relatability or Likability?

Everyone has a different idea of what is crucial for a story to succeed. Some people declare that the protagonist has to be likable, while others say that the protagonist just has to be relatable. Many people think a protagonist has to be likable because why else would an audience care about the story, but there are a lot of unlikable protagonist out there who have successful stories (American History X, The Social Network, Wolf of Wall Street). Because of this, many people believe that a protagonist doesn’t have to be likable, they just have to have something about them that an audience can relate to. Even that seems like a stretch, however, because there isn’t any way to guarantee that you will give your protagonist a relatable trait.

Personally, I think there is a third option, and that is to simply focus on making your protagonist understandable. If your audience can understand where you protagonist is coming from, and why they do what they will do, then whether they like the protagonist or not, and whether they relate or not, they will be able to follow the story and understand it.

If the audience can understand your character and their decisions, then they can connect with the story and enjoy it as if they are going on a journey with the character. Yes, likability and relatability help the audience connect more, but when you have a character that doesn’t allow for those things your story can still work as long as the character is understandable.

So how do you do these things? How do you make a character understandable, likable, and relatable? All audiences aren’t the same, but there are several general ways to accomplish these three things.

Understandable Characters:

1. Define the character.

I don’t mean write a definition of them, but I do mean show the audience who they are. Give the character a defining moment where their true personality comes out. Are they the person who runs when they see trouble, or do they jump to help without a thought for their own safety? The first step to making a character understandable is to show the audience who they are.

2. Explain why.

Why is your character the way they are? If that isn’t pertinent to the story, or maybe you can’t find an interesting way to show it, then tell us why the character does what they do. Find a way to show these things and it is another step in making the character believable, and understandable for the audience. At the very least, you as the writer should always know why the character does what they do so you can use it as motivation for your character’s behavior.

3. Justify.

Whenever your character is doing something that is abnormal, justify it. Don’t just write it and pretend the audience won’t notice. Instead, find a way to explain why they are doing it. In screenwriting there is a term called “Hang a Lantern on it” which means to call attention to the thing that is not normal or when something is cliché. If the audience is going to stop and question it, then have the character stop and question it and justify why it is happening that way. This is a method for cutting off the doubt before the audience can experience it, and it helps with making the plot and character understandable.

Likable Characters:

This is a more generic category, but there are several different characters traits that consistently make for likable and interesting protagonists.

1. A good person, or trying to be.

A character who is a good person is generally likable. They’re kind, do nice things, and aren’t selfish. That being said, they can’t be self-righteous about it. If the character isn’t necessarily a good person, but is trying to be, that also makes them likable.

2. Extremely talented or gifted people.

People in general like talented people. Even if they’re jerks, people respect talent and are drawn to it. So a talented character can be very likable. If they’re too much a jerk it can eventually override the likability factor, but for the most part, characters with extreme skills are likable.

3. Funny characters.

People like funny people. It’s as simple as that. Of course there are humorous people that aren’t likable, but as protagonists they make for characters you want to follow to see what funny thing they’ll do next. It also helps that the audience doesn’t have to interact with the character directly, so any mean humor is not directed at the audience and is simply something the audience can enjoy from the outside. A lot of times these funny characters that are jerks are likable because they are saying the mean things a lot of people think, but never say out loud.

Relatable Characters:

1. Make them do something mundane.

There are all sorts of mundane things that everyone does – brush their teeth, drive a car, go to work, watch TV, eat, etc. They’re the kinds of things that are just a fact of life, and making your character have to do them is a simple way to give the audience something to connect to. The only problem is, it isn’t generally interesting unless it is an extraordinary character who is forced to do the ordinary thing – such as a superhero doing laundry.

2. Give them a bad habit.

Everyone has bad habits, and there are some habits that are more popular than others that are an easy way to give a character something relatable (nail biting). If you give your character a bad habit, it’s a flaw that the audience can connect to, and it is something that humanizes them.

3. Give them family.

Everyone has some form of family, and almost everyone can relate to an embarrassing family moment. A mother who is over affectionate, a father who yells at the TV, a brother who tells his friends embarrassing things about you, etc. If you give your protagonist a family that they have to interact with, it not only creates a deeper character, but it also creates something that an audience can maybe relate to.

Final Notes:

Whether you decide likability, relatability, or being understandable is the most important thing, there are a lot of ways to achieve your goal. Decide what you think is important to a story, and what you find most appealing about the stories you read or watch, and go with that. Whichever you decide, the key is paying attention to the little details. Remember the how, and the why, and the everyday things that your character does, and make sure they are given careful attention when being written so that they are used to make your character better.

For more information on creating better characters, check out my blog on Author the World titled “5 Tips for Establishing Character”.

You can also check out last week’s Memo where we discussed “5 Ways to Increase Tension in Story“, as this connects to the discussion of what makes a story interesting.