On Writing: Relatable Characters

On rare occasions, we'll publish something that's twisted around, upside-down, back to front, or that's missing important parts — characters, for instance. Just imagine a story with no characters! Okay, now imagine the same story, only interesting. Tough to do. There's a reason it's rare that we publish things like that.

Most published stories have characters that are relatable because that's the best way to keep readers interested. If they're not interested, they won't read. No matter how cool your idea is, if people won't read it, it's the same as if you never wrote about it at all.

"Relatable character" means a minimum of three things:

• We know not just what they think but how they feel, not just what they see but how they perceive it.

• They're experiencing an emotion that we can understand, even if we ourselves have never experienced anything quite like it before.

• Their actions — their thoughts — are the natural ones for who they are in the situation they are in.

Bear in mind: Nothing here says that a character has to be the same as the writer or the reader in order for them to be relatable. In fact, it's easier to define, and thus communicate, their perspective if it's quite different. We've had stories featuring sentient spaceships, aliens, robots, even a dying planet once.

I cannot recall a single story we've published that had zero characters.

The more different they are, the more vital it is that they hold something in common with us readers, something we can relate to while we read the story. The planet character, for example, had a flourishing native civilization about which it felt quite fondly. Even those of us without children of our own could read that and think, "It makes sense the way that planet feels."

That's not a sentence, you'll admit, we use often in our daily lives. And yet, it's the factor that makes the story readable.

The Bottom Line: If you want your story to get published, write relatable characters.