This month, we’ve learned about creating sympathetic characters—giving them strength and struggles, balancing each of those elements, and specific techniques for making our readers identify with even unlovable characters.
If you want to read more on creating sympathetic characters, here are the absolute best, most useful resources I’ve found:
- Sympathy without Saintliness, an online article by author/editor Alicia Rasley. Alicia takes us through some of the most beloved characters in literature capture our sympathies, as well as dispelling some common authorial misconceptions about how we can make our readers like our characters.
- How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II by James N. Frey, specifically chapter one, which shows internal and external techniques to create deeper and deeper sympathy in your readers (which we’ve discussed here briefly).
- The Unlovable Character, a blog post on Writing on the Wall Blog by Julie Wright with an exhaustive list of techniques and characteristics to make readers love even unlovable characters (which she graciously expanded with more examples for us here).
[Update: here’s a great quick overview on techniques that do and don’t work for character sympathy.]
By request, in July we’re going to celebrate summer by taking a plunge in the deep end of POV. (Don’t you just love the clichés?) This is a great way to follow up a series on characters, since we have to know our characters well to get into deep point-of-view, and since we’ve been working all June to help our readers lose themselves within our characters.
What resources have you found that helped you improve your characters? What would you like to read about in deep POV?
Image credit: Svilen Mushkatov
