How Do You Know If A Character Is Good or Not?

Here are a few easy tips and tricks to test your character and how well they are working (for readers).

Emotional Engagement

Sign: Readers feel a strong emotional connection to your character.

Why It Matters: Elicits empathy, sympathy, or even dislike or mistrust from readers. If your audience cares, you've succeeded.

Test: Ask beta readers how they feel about your character. Do they understand their fears and desires?

Example: Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird captures our hearts with her innocence, curiosity, and change.

Depth and Complexity

Sign: Your character is multi-dimensional in positive and negative ways.

Why It Matters: Real people are complex and readers enjoy seeing this complexity, because it’s real and often a sign of good, intelligent writing.

Test: Examine your character's profile. Do they have a mix of positive and negative traits? Are they sometimes contradictory in their behaviours? Is theirs a rich and layered experience of the world? Be honest with yourself. It matters too much not to be.

Example: Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice is intelligent and witty but also sometimes judgemental and critical. She has to resolve the tension between her good and bad qualities in order to get what she wants.

Clear Motivations

Sign: Your character’s motivations are clear and compelling to the reader.

Why It Matters: Motivations drive actions in a novel. If readers understand why your character acts as they do, they will believe in the journey.

Test: Write a brief summary of your character's goals and motivations. Quite simply, are they clear and believable? Do they face challenges throughout the story? Do you understand? Because if you don’t, your reader won’t.

Example: Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby is driven by his desire to win back his lost love, Daisy, which informs his actions and adds depth to his character.

NOTE: It is perfectly possible for a character’s internal motivations to be unclear or murky, and for this to be part of their transformation and arc. But it should still be clear why they are doing things. Having said that, it is even possible to withhold explaining why someone is doing something, but what they are doing must be compellingly clear. This story would have a very mysterious atmosphere, but most readers would expect some kind of revelation of intent near the end.

Growth and Transformation

Sign: Your character undergoes significant change over the course of the story. They are pushed to change, and they probably resist it, but they almost certainly end up transformed.

Why It Matters: Character transformation provides a dynamic reading experience and a clear emotional and intellectual journey for the reader.

Test: Outline your character's arc. Do they start in one place and end in another? How did they change? What lessons do they learn? What is their arc of transformation?

Example: Frodo in The Lord of the Rings transforms from a naive hobbit into a brave but more worldly hero. In Yann Martel’s Life Of Pi, a young boy who is curious about the world learns much about its fragility and his own resilience and spirituality through a lengthy physical ordeal.

Consistency and Believability

Sign: Your character should behave in ways that are consistent with their personality and backstory.

Why It Matters: Consistency makes your character believable. If they suddenly act out of character without very good reason (and this is possible), it confuses the reader.

Test: Review key scenes to ensure consistency. Analyse and either remove or explain any out-of-character actions.

Example: Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird consistently upholds his principles throughout the novel, at great cost, making his character believable and liked.

How To Write A Novel Chapter By Chapter available here: https://www.amazon.com/How-Write-Novel-Chapter-Outlining-ebook/dp/B0DJ8TMVWL?ref_=ast_author_mpb

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