Being a Better Writer: Character Relations · 3:24pm Aug 9th, 2016
With a title like that, I’m sure some of you thought that this was going to be about relationships. Maybe even romance, or even something steamier.
Yeah, no. Sorry. And for that last one, don’t get your hopes up. That’s not what I write (and yet people keep requesting it …).
Which probably leaves a number of you wondering if maybe what I’m going to be talking about today is character interactions. And, sorry to say, like the rest of the theories, I’m going to have to nix this one as well.
No, today’s topic is something that was kicked off in my head by an interview I read over the weekend and the ensuing reddit commentary. A film producer (or maybe writer/director, to be honest I’m not sure and I don’t feel like looking it back up) was talking about why they didn’t like the current success of superhero films, and arguing that no one really liked them because the characters weren’t anything that anyone could relate to.
Now, I don’t agree with his assessment, but it got me thinking about characters that we write and create, and what our audience is going to relate to, and I realized it might make a good topic for a Being a Better Writer post. After all, if people want characters that they can relate to … well, it’s important that we understand both what they mean by that and how we can deliver it.
You can read the rest of this post at Unusual Things
This is a good one.
I would have named it 'Character Relatability', though, to avoid the confusion.
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I could have, yes ... but I deliberately chose not to. The goal of relatability is to further the characters relationship with the reader, so the title does work. More importantly, though, the bait-and-switch gets people to pay attention, since the expectation is subverted.
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