Ask a Book Editor: The Best Way to Introduce Compelling Characters in Your Novel

Photo by Siavash Ghanbari on Unsplash

Ever try to read a story and find yourself thinking, I seriously don’t care what happens to these characters?

Maybe you’re a chapter in and already getting antsy, your mind drifting to dinner options. Or worse, bored on the very first page. If so, it doesn’t matter how amazing it gets because the writer is about to lose a reader.

Likability equals reader investment. No one voluntarily hangs with—and I’d argue that’s what pleasure reading is—someone they don’t care about (yet). It applies to heroes and villains and all the desirable real-life shades in between.

How then do you hook readers’ interest and empathy early on?

With characters, you want to meet them “in the wild” versus being told everything about them.

Let your readers watch characters in action and form their own initial impressions. Allow them to actively fill in some blanks…even if you subvert them later.

Think about it. When you decide if you like someone, it’s by observing them in action—how they interact with and treat others, which in turn reveals a lot about themselves. Even in job interview situations, it’s not from reading someone’s résumé alone. But as writers creating a rich and vivid world, it’s tempting to want to front-load character introductions with so much information, desperate to have readers fall in love with them too. Instead, it can be an avalanche of back story, physical description, and “What I Did Over the Summer Vacation” tedium before this tale begins. It challenges the reader’s patience versus intriguingly setting a scene.  

It’s really not all that different from cinema. There are no character featurettes or (successful) inner monologues offered before we drop in their world. Trust readers’ curiosity and then reward them with unfolding characters—especially the protagonist(s)—that surprise, share, and evolve over the course of the narrative. Introduce conflict or a game-changer early and your readers won’t be going anywhere except to the next chapter, hungry for more.