Welcome to day 4 of PREPTOBER! This is a series of daily questions and prompts to help you prepare for this year’s upcoming NaNoWriMo!
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Today’s question is:
Who does your character love?
Feel free to share your answer in the comments! I would love to hear your response!
This may seem like a fluffy, irrelevant question. So let me explain why it is important to think about it.
Since we are often seeing your story through the lens of your main character, we have a tremendous amount of empathy for them.
We are experiencing their experiences as if they were our own.
So if your character loves another character, whether it be family, friends, or a romantic interest, we as the reader are going to automatically love them.
You may disagree but stick with me.
Everything in your novel inherently has value to the reader. By the sheer fact of it existing on the page, you have signed a contract with the reader to tell them— this is important. I am forcing you to read this sentence and that sentence in order to get to the next sentence because it is all valuable to the experience.
By giving your Main Character loved ones, you are holding up a big flashing sign to your reader— this person is really, really important!
What your character values, the reader will subconsciously value. This is necessary for readers to fall into the story, which they are predisposed to do. Getting lost in the story is all readers want to do, and they do it by empathizing with the character, loving the things they love, hating the things they hate, etc.
The problem you may have run into as a reader is that you actually hate these characters. They are annoying or unbearable. They have some sort of quirk that disgusts you or makes you roll your eyes when their name comes across the page.
There are three reasons this may happen.
They are supposed to be annoying and cause tension, like Skyler White in Breaking Bad, Catelyn Stark in Game of Thrones, Cho Chang in Harry Potter
They are actually a villain, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the main character hasn’t realized yet like Hans in Frozen, Tamlin in A Court of Thorns and Roses, or Qi’ra in Solo
The author has broken the trust of the reader and abused their predisposition to love a character the main character loves. Like Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow in Game of Thrones (This relationship is a little nuanced because both Jon & Dany are main characters. Let me know in the comments if you want to hear more about why this relationship didn’t work.)
And you want to avoid that last one.
With the other two options, we can see that there is a way to leverage this tendency to love the things our main character loves to create tension or to support a plot twist. The reader not loving the characters your MC loves is okay when there’s a reason we have a love/hate relationship with the characters in our MC’s life.
Otherwise, we tend to love them too, almost inexplicably— even if they don’t have very much screen time. Like Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, Prim Everdeen, and John Wick’s Dog. We love them because our main character does.
So, who does your main character love and why?
Share this post with a friend so that we can all write together!
My character loves her children, they are the reason for her inner conflict. There is a dwarf family who will become like her own family because the father encourages her and the grandmother is good with her kids. There is an elf who becomes her best friend because he sits with her while she is crippled and helps her walk again.