What makes characters likable?

[Kessie]

>> I myself am a little tired of immature, impetuous young people, who have to learn the hard way to be discreet and responsible over the course of the book.<<

LOL, well said, Gwen! And now I feel bad, because that's pretty much my WIP. But that's also the way young people ARE. Especially if they're trying to make their own choices about life and don't really want help. Heaven knows I'm that way. But you're right about taking advice. Obi-Wan gives Luke lots of advice and Luke doesn't always take it.

[Gwenllian]

I don't mind young people being immature and rather impetuous. You are right Kessie, that's pretty much how young people are! Experience can only come with time. The frustrating part is the lack of respect for the wisdom and knowledge of their elders; a common enough trait even in the real world, but not every young person has it.

Jan 24, 2013 21:38:05 GMT -5 Divides the Waters said:

I agree with that, Gwen. I don't think maturity is necessarily being equated with perfection, though. I think you can have a very good, mature character who is still imperfect; i.e., still makes the wrong decisions, has to deal with the consequences thereof, etc.

That's true! I would never expect a character to be perfect just because he's pretty mature and generally wise. No matter how old you are you will continue to make mistakes. But an experienced 40-year-old who's been fighting the evil empire his whole life will probably make different mistakes than a green 18-year-old fresh off the farm.

[Bought In Blood]

Going off of what Lexkx was saying, I think that a character’s likability is more important than their believability. I don’t care how believable a character is if I still don’t care what happens to them because they have such a caustic personality. I think Game of Thrones (Song of Ice and Fire) is a good example of lots of believable characters that are unlikable. I also quit reading the wheel of time in book 1 because the female characters were so badly written and so irritating that I couldn’t go on (the male characters were pretty bad too actually).

Whenever a reader picks up a fiction book (and knows that it’s fiction), they are exerting some Willing Suspension of Disbelief or WSD. This means that they are willing to believe in things that are unrealistic as long as they are not completely improbable. Therefore, you can get away with having characters be highly skilled for their age, or wise beyond their years, but when a character is too ridiculously overpowered or overcompetent, the WSD breaks and the reader will put the book down.

There are a couple other elements that allow you take more liberties with believability such as the Rule of Cool:

“The limit of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to the element's awesomeness.”

Several other such rules are as follows: Rule of Funny, Rule of Fun, Rule of Scary, Rule of Drama, Rule of Romantic, Rule of Cute, etc.

Moving on. Finding a balance of virtues and vices can be tough when creating characters. I recently read some novels by a secular author where the main character is so flawed that I almost rent the book asunder out of frustration at his inability to deal with problems. A good example of balance is Tolkien’s characters of Aragorn and Boromir. I consider both of them as very likable characters. One succumbed to his vice (coveting the ring) and caused the Fellowship to be broken. The other stayed true to his virtuous nature. Now, I am aware that by today’s standards, these characters are considered unrealistic. This is why in those Peter Jackson movies, they made Aragorn afraid of power and gave Faramir daddy issues. The overall vibe I’m getting from the secular world is that they don’t like virtuous characters because they don’t believe in God. Therefore there is no such thing as a ‘good’ character, just another shade of grey.

And that’s horrible.

[storyspirit4u]

I think it depends a lot on your target audience. For me as a Children's Reading Specialist and always choosing what they crave to read- it gave me some insight. Teens love a good old supernatural with awesome powers. They also want one that is not so predictable. I just had this chat with some tweens last week.
Cheers!

[stormiel]

That's interesting. What would they consider predictable/unpredictable?