Earlier this week, I worked with an author who was working on publishing his first book. He was self-taught, but took his writing education very seriously. He told me that he’d gone through a few writing books, regularly browsed feedback communities, and spent quite a bit of time on YouTube learning the craft from others.
There’s a lot of conventional wisdom out there, but many writers and first-time authors encounter the same problems. Despite the wealth of online knowledge, there is still confusion. Earlier in my writing career, I was in this same position. I found advice to be often contradictory, unnecessarily vague, or too specific to apply to whatever I was writing at that time.
One of the many reasons we started ProjectK is because our team saw that feedback was often vague and nonspecific. In my personal opinion, vague feedback IS NOT FEEDBACK (or not good, at the very least). There’s no point in giving feedback if the recipient can’t interpret it and apply it to their work.
First rule: there are no rules
This would be where I usually roll my eyes. But it’s true. These “rules” have been developed over the years, by millions of writers figuring out how to write better stories. If you break all these rules but create a great story that someone loves, then you’ve done it! That’s the goal at the end of the day. If you’re trying to publish (self-publish or traditional), you want someone to read it. If you’re writing for you, that’s fine, but you’re not part of this conversation.
So instead of rules, let us call them guidelines (insert clip of Captain Barbossa on the Pirate Code).
Characters should have a flaw
Assuming we want a character that stands above window dressing, they need to have a flaw. It must have a real, tangible impact, an impact that should be felt in the story, more than just a checkbox to be crossed off a list.
But why?
A character with flaws is generally relatable, and it makes it a lot easier for the reader to empathize with the character and get behind them. Imagine whatever piece of fiction you love the most, now imagine swapping out your favourite character with a pristine paragon of goodness. They are perfect in every way. Is that still a good story? It’s probably boring. Even Superman has kryptonite.
If you want to take it a step further, create a character that fits your audience. Let’s say I’m writing a book intended for Canadian high school kids in 2026. If I consider what flaws a potential high schooler might connect with, the answer would probably be something to the effect of a character with a phone addiction and self-image issues stemming from online culture. Or maybe I might do something related to modern nihilism. Whether conscious or subconscious, the reader gravitates towards characters they can relate to.
Beyond relatability, a character with a flaw has an opportunity to fix that flaw, a la “an arc.”
Characters should have an arc
Again, building an arc for your characters is not an item to be crossed off your list.
Readers love to see a character overcome adversity, it’s built into our nature. Provided your reader wants to see your character succeed, it’s natural for the reader to want to cheer them on.
An arc is simply the transition from one state to another. Attentive readers at this point might notice that the character flaw is simply the starting point to the arc. If your character’s flaw is that they “lack confidence,” by the end of their arc “they have confidence.” If they’re extremely independent and have learned to wall off others to protect their heart, their arc ends with them opening up to another character and accepting help.
If you struggle with defining a character arc, take the idealized form of the character at the end of the story and work backwards. All the little scenes building towards that end goal are the character beats that contribute to the arc. If done correctly, you should end up back at the same flaw.
Ideally, you want to tie in your character beats with your plot beats. The character flaw and the barriers of the plot should interweave and play off each other. If your character is overtly independent, put them on a cliff and have them hanging off the edge by their fingertips. They think they can pull themselves up, so they don’t ask for help or accept the help when it’s offered. Then they fall. “Oh no, the character fell off the cliff,” or “oh no, the character fell into a river and now they’re separated from the group, floating away.”
Now that character needs to find their way back to the group. That is a small, simple example of how a character flaw informs the plot. It doesn’t always work out that way, and it isn’t easy. But if you can make it work, I promise it will enrich your story.
Characters should have motivations
It sounds simple and silly, but you would be surprised how often new-ish writers allow their characters to be swallowed by the plot. Far too often, a character will go here, do this, run from that, shoot this, discover that. But the writer never stops to ask why. Taken to the worst possible outcome, this same writer publishes their work and ARCs, beta readers, and first paid readers start asking questions like: why is this character doing that? Why did they say this?
Those questions take the reader out of the story and are an instant sign that you have a motivation problem.
Start asking “why” when you flesh out your characters. Asking “why” doesn’t just help with defining character motivations, but also helps find nuggets of gold that might have been unexpected.
Your character is on an island. Why? They want access to a native tomb. Why? They want to steal the treasure. Why? It’s worth a lot of money. Why do they want money? An amateur probably stops here. They say they want money because people want money. Even if I can agree with that, it leaves a weak foundation. An experienced writer says: they need it for their young sister. Why? The sister is dying. Boom. Now there’s connective tissue with most readers who have a shred of empathy, and an even stronger connection with those who don’t hate their families and have sisters that they love. Even if you don’t agree with the point on empathy, it’s undeniable that getting money for the dying sister is the deeper option than just saying the character wants money because money is nice.
What’s critical here is that their motivation must inform their actions. Too often, poor writing rears its ugly head when a character is given a family or a small child and it’s shoehorned into the story.
Just because a character has a family doesn’t mean they’re automatically relatable to audiences that love their families. It’s a shortcut that has little reward. A good example of this is the film Greyhound. Tom Hanks is the lead in this film, and his character is a US Navy destroyer captain in WW2. The first scene we have is Tom Hanks with his wife, exchanging Christmas gifts. The acting and writing of that scene aside, it’s a mild-mannered introduction to the movie. But as the film progresses, it becomes clear that having a wife does not motivate Tom Hanks’s character; in fact, it bears no relevance on the story at all.
So why include it?
My guess is that the writers wanted him to be relatable, to build connective tissue with the audience. They inserted a scene where we get to see that he has a loving wife to get back to and survive for. But they didn’t build it into the story.
The end result is that the character feels hollow, and the story feels hollow. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie as a lover of those kinds of movies, but I felt nothing, and I’m quite sure most viewers were like myself (but perhaps were unable to articulate why).
Empathy and sympathy are your sword and shield
Motivation ties in nicely to my next point. Remember, the goal is to build a character that your reader can get behind. Far too often, writers will create a character that is very one-note but appeals to a group.
Any core character must be understandable. Your audience must be able to put themselves in the character’s shoes and understand their actions. Sympathy helps build a connection with the audience, but if you add empathy, it adds complexity and depth.
This is particularly poignant with antagonists. Take, for example, the antagonists from the Mistborn books and the Avengers (the MCU). The King in Mistborn feels initially very one-note. He’s a bad guy; he seems to be all consumed by greed and power. He rules with an iron fist, doles out punishment with violence, and has created a slave caste of people that he uses liberally. By sympathizing with the victims of the King’s actions, we believe we understand the King. But it’s only when the King is killed, and we understand the “why” of his actions, that the reader suddenly has context for his actions and can empathize to a degree with what he did.
For those of you who’ve read the book, imagine there was no greater meaning to the King’s actions. He was a bad guy, doing bad things, because he’s a bad guy.
When he’s eventually toppled, would it feel more impactful than the version Sanderson gave us? Probably not.
Remember when Thanos was collecting the Infinity Stones? No matter your opinion on the quality of Marvel movies, you have to agree that was a great time in movie culture. Almost universally, audiences at least understood why Thanos was doing what he did. If he was just a nebulous bad guy, it would have been far less impactful than what we got.
Differentiate your characters
This may sound simple, but far too many early writers unwittingly copy-and-paste their characters. I can only assume this is because they really want to write about a certain character, and that desire is so strong that it accidentally bleeds into more than just one person.
This is easier than it may seem, and can be done when your first draft is done. Go back and add little differentiators to the character. Create tics (verbal and physical) that align with this character. If you want to take it a step further, don’t just add flavour to their dialogue but change how they react to the plot and other characters. Adjust their dialogue so it has a constant prism of negativity or constant naive optimism.
It’s obviously easier to just do this from the start.
Tying it all together
You may understand this subconsciously, or you might have arrived here from outside learning. Or maybe you’re only starting to understand it now. I don’t proclaim to have all the answers, and this section might get a little controversial. Take in my thoughts and put your lens over it; that is what it means to be a writer.
The truth about writing good characters comes down to emotion. Now, there is a range of emotions that can be applied from your prism onto yourself, but if you’re trying to feel something about someone else (real or fictional), it often comes back to sympathy and empathy.
Tying it all together requires an understanding of where and when to weaponize sympathy and empathy.
Let’s take a quick pause. Zoom out.
All characters in a story can be put into two buckets: protagonist or antagonist. You might say, “but what about those who are neither?” That is fair. There are characters that don’t really have a dog in the fight. But I don’t view them as characters; they’re closer to an element of the setting, a fixture of the background, not a lived-in entity that we should feel something about.
Be it a core protagonist or a supporting antagonist, we should feel something about them.
I touched on antagonists briefly already. Antagonists are tricky because, almost always, you don’t want an antagonist who is sympathetic. Sympathy is poignant and automatically puts them in an underdog position in our minds. It’s perfectly natural for our brains to root for an underdog to succeed, but we can’t have a story where we’re rooting for the antagonist to win. At best it takes the teeth out of the antagonist’s bite, and at worst it calls into question why the story even exists, as we follow a protagonist going against an antagonist we’re rooting for.
The logic is simple enough to understand, and I bet there are a few already challenging it. And they’re right to challenge it. Here’s an example that breaks the mold.
Gollum. Gollum is an antagonist from the Lord of the Rings. Infamously, he’s tortured by the call of the Ring so viciously that his own personality fractured into two. As Frodo and Sam interact with Gollum, the wretched creature becomes more sympathetic in the eyes of the viewer and reader.
But here’s the key distinction. One, Gollum exists as a mirror for Frodo. He’s almost there to show the audience, and give hope to Frodo, that there is a way back after the Ring’s had its claws in him. Gollum needs to be sympathetic for this connection to be made. Two, Gollum is not the only antagonist. The Ring/Sauron, orcs, the spider, Saruman; there are other forces to act as foils for our protagonists. If the story only followed Sam and Frodo, it would feel like all the tension was sucked from the story when we see Gollum turning towards good. It would seem like the story lost its reason for existing, and his eventual turn back to evil might feel like whiplash if Gollum had to carry the entire weight of the audience’s attention.
Rather, you want your readers to empathize with your antagonists. Help us understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. There’s an unspoken drive in all of us to want to codify and understand the unknown; apply that to your characters. Hide the antagonist’s motivation from us while hinting that something deeper is there, or write it like Mistborn and flip the reader’s preconceived notion on its head.
Whether it’s sympathy or empathy, understand that an antagonist doesn’t strictly need either of those things for a story to be good. Take the original Star Wars movies. Palpatine. Vader. Stormtroopers that literally wear a mask the entire time. Lucas goes out of his way to show us that we don’t need to know much about the bad guys except that they’re bad guys (except for that one twist with Vader that I won’t spoil for the three of you who don’t know).
And that’s where the distinction matters. I’d argue that Star Wars is great because of what it does with its protagonists. Luke. Obi-Wan. Han. Leia. These characters have a strong foundation; we want them to succeed, and we understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Because so much attention is given to the protagonists, it’s enough to overlook the antagonists.
Antagonists without emotion are not a death sentence. It’s like having a piece of chicken without any sauce. Sure, it’s fine and I’ll eat it, but imagine it with a scoop of gravy and a side of mashed potatoes. I know which one I’m choosing.
And on the topic of protagonists, the best protagonists have a strong foundation of sympathy and empathy.
Effectively, that means we give them a flaw so we can sympathize with them. We want to sympathize with them so we can get behind them. As soon as we’re behind them, we want them to succeed.
We give them a motivation so we can empathize. When their actions align with what we know they want, it grounds the reader in the story.
I’m sure there are examples that contradict this deconstructed understanding. But I’m not focused on the outliers. I want to get to the core of what makes a story great.
Choose your favourite story, or if you’re like me, choose one of many. Ask yourself if you understand and are cheering along for the protagonist(s). Then ask the same for the antagonist(s). Do you support them? Do you understand them?
I’m guessing the answer is yes, yes, no, yes.