What Makes a Character Worth Liking?

I’ve just started corresponding with my #LitChat friend @Mamafog (also known as Karen) about what makes a fictional character likable. In particular, she asks what makes a character likable for me?

As seen previously in this space, I’ve been giving my reading some thought, finding more and more of the novels recommended to me by others as not enjoyable or just okay. Where I used to devour anything readable – including the backs of cereal boxes when I was out of books – I now have to make time to read, so naturally resent spending time on books I don’t like. And, generally speaking, I don’t like books where I don’t like the main characters.

What Makes a Character Worth Liking?

  • I guess, first of all, I have to be able to see myself, at least a little, in him or her. Someone completely different will make it hard for me to identify with them as they struggle with their challenges. This isn’t usually a problem, since all of us share some traits.
  • S/he has to have a decent code of ethics at core. Just the basics – not killing people for fun or wanting to have ultimate power, that kind of thing.
  • S/he has to be self-aware. There’s no point in seeing how a character grows if s/he remains blissfully ignorant of the changes s/he’s gone through.
  • I like a sense of humour. It can be dark, sarcastic, self-deprecating, or just wacky. Humour helps us recognize ourselves and frame a situation. What makes you laugh helps define you. And if you have no sense of humour, that might be funny in itself.
  • With secondary characters, I prefer they not be there just to serve as cannon fodder or to scream on cue. Even if they won’t be around long enough for me to learn much about them, I like it when I feel they are as much people as the main characters.

That’s the short list for me. I’m sure that continuing to think about it will bring other things to light, like why some books I enjoyed even though I didn’t like the characters. And what part narrative plays in helping me decide whether a book and its characters are good or not*.

Got your own list  of what makes you like a character or not?  Let’s talk about it.

* ‘Good’ being a term relative to our individual interpretations, of course.

Show Me The Character

I started reading Incarceron (by Catherine Fisher) as part of my foray into YA books (also read Leviathan by Westerfield and Thompson, reviewed on Goodreads here). It started up slow for me and only now, where the two main protagonists are actually talking with each other, is it really starting to get interesting to me. I’m also reading The Pale Blue Eye (by Louis Bayard) and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (by Susanna Clarke). These books, in conjunction with some discussions on both LitChat and SciFiChat on Twitter have underlined for me the fact that if I don’t like the characters, I probably won’t like the book. Maybe this is why so many modern novels in ‘Literature’ remain only partially read by me – they seem to be inhabited by a bunch of people I would not want to know. Some writers have told me they like to read about the human condition. My condition is such that I want to spend my precious reading time with either an interesting puzzle, learning something new (nonfiction), or with fictional people I can admire or whose company I enjoy.

What have you learned about yourself from what you’ve read?