Sell Your Story With Relationships, Not Just Good Characters

Make your stories like real life

When I was a little girl, I loved playing with dolls. My favorite was a character made popular from the Dick Tracy comic strip. The year I got my Sparkle Plenty doll was the last year I believed in Santa Claus. He’d saved the best for last.

I kept the doll for nostalgia’s sake until my first year of college. I’m not sure what happened to her after that. However, while she was my favorite toy, she had every characteristic of a real child, down to her fluttering eyelashes.

Had I been a writer back then, I could have copied every detail of Sparkle to create a character in fiction. I would have brought her to life on the page with her long hair and fat fingers. I could have described her clothes down to the lace on her socks. A writing teacher would have been hard-pressed not to give me an A for characterization.

Yet, that description alone would no more recreate a real relationship in a book than my long-ago beloved doll imitated the relationship I had with my life real daughter.

A cardinal rule of writing tells us that characters sell books.

That’s true whether you’re writing a terrorist thriller, a nursery school tale, or a non-fiction essay.

Specific, real-life details that mimic actual people make our readers care about the characters we create. In other words, you have to give a character more than a name. They need gestures, quirks, traits, a description of their physicality. The skill with which we recreate our characters can make or break a book.

The worse criticism of a character in a novel is that it is one-dimensional or a stick figure, meaning it doesn’t have the fleshed-out quality of a real human being. Sometimes you need just a talking head, a character to speak an important line of dialogue to fill in a hole in a story. But if you fill it out with a memorable trait, the character doesn’t have to return, the reader is more likely to remember the line of dialogue. A kid has to say, “The cops are coming.” But if he runs into the room breathless with blood running down his face and says, “The cops are coming,” the scene will spring to life. That’s characterization, moving from a stick figure to real life.

Characters live in the context of a relationship.

However well you draw a character, though, if we don’t put our characters in the context of a relationship, we also miss the boat. We treat them as no more than well-costumed manikens, like figures in a department store window on display because they wear clothes well. You’d never imagine sitting down to have a conversation with them, though.

I see this up close in genre novels that I edit, whether they are mysteries or romances, where plot is paramount. Writers can go to great lengths to describe their characters so that you can almost hear their tinkling jewelry and imagine the way they lean over their eggs and coffee when their checking their email.

But in terms of relationships, they can seem stilted. They will have conversations with one person at a time to move the plot along, and only exchange enough information to make a scene clear.

In real life, however, people say many pointless things to each other in the course of a meal. They start sentences and get interrupted by the dog demanding her dinner or the child who has just skinned his knee and needs attention. Or, they interrupt each other to continue an earlier conversation.

Often, there is no plot in real life, but there is always relationship.

The author Don DiLillo did a brilliant portrait of a marriage in a long sequence in his novel, Underworld, where he wrote a rambling, disjointed conversation between a married couple that perfectly demonstrates my point.

He shows them in relationship with each other by using the intimacy of their conversation, the stops and starts, the oh I forgot to tell you, the finishing of each other’s sentences. We watch as they lose their train of thought and go on to another topic because it doesn’t matter, the way we do when we’re watching TV with our partner or doing the dishes or getting reading for bed.

This kind of ramble won’t always suit your story, of course, but I use it to show how one author shows the fullness of a relationship, not just deftly drawn characters — their hair color and gestures — to make memorable fiction.

I have one editing client who writes a very popular series with a recurring family. One feature in each of her books involves a scene at their Friday night dinners, a regular gathering of this family. The patriarch, a widowed father/grandfather/uncle figure, an aunt/mother/sister to the patriarch, various grown daughters and their children, and their friends are all welcome. We see them arrive and greet one another, prepare the meal, exchange their news, set the table, watch TV, have squabbles during dessert, and wrap up the leftovers to take to their respective homes, all as aspects of the plot unfolds.

The writer has told me that her readers write to her about how much they love the family and the way they interact with each other and how they wish they could come to Friday night dinner. How much they love her characters.

But it is not just the characters they love. Yes, she writes great characters and gives them good lines and interesting predicaments to work through. But it is the relationships they have with each other that her readers get drawn into and can understand. Everybody has had a family, whether it’s good, bad, a big one, or a small one. We can long for an idealized family we never had.

She writes Friday night dinner scenes where the characters come alive in their relationships with each other. We yearn for the warmth and humor they display toward each other, the love. We understand the pettiness and their disputes, many of which are ongoing. Underpinning all of it is a family bond that she has developed in her series that we long to share.

Show relationships between children, between a character and an animal, between a child and a toy. Bring the interaction to life, and you animate a well-drawn character and pull your reader into a story so that they suspend disbelief.

A character is successful not just because it is well-drawn and because we can relate to its life and challenges.

But when you show a character in relationship to others in a three-dimensional way, through gesture, dialogue, conflict, emotion, your readers are living a piece of their own life through that character. They are living the character’s life, and in a real way, the characters are relating to the reader and having a relationship with the reader.

And that’s a successful character, more importantly, a successful story.

I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status in several categories. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. I’ll make sure you don’t miss a word. Thank you for reading.

m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status in several categories. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. I’ll make sure you don’t miss a word. Thank you for reading.