Have you ever been introduced to someone at a get-together who was so off-putting you were convinced within seconds that you could never be friends with that person, let alone hold a decent conversation with them?
Now imagine yourself chatting with a mutual friend the next day and discovering that the unlikeable person from the night before is someone who has severe social anxiety and the event you’d met at was the first time they’d left their home in months.
Or perhaps you mention to your friend that after you got home you realized the unlikeable guest reminded you of the grade-school nemesis who had made your schooldays a living nightmare, and you discover this new person is a survivor of extreme abuse and someone who instinctively views everyone as a potential threat until they get to know them better.
How might that impact your earlier impression? Might you have been more empathetic and less quick to judge if you’d had just a fraction of that information at that time of your introduction?
The Reader and the Unlikeable Character
As writers, we are a lot like the mutual friend mentioned above. The difference is, we introduce real people to fictional characters. Just as our readers have a past that colors how they view and interact with the world around them, so do our characters. However, unlike the party situation, we rarely get to have the “next day” conversation with readers who were turned off by a character they found “unlikeable” or “unrelatable.”
While it’s true that our characters will not always be a good match for every reader who picks up our books, we do have the opportunity to give our characters their best chance by introducing a reason for them having those unlikeable traits from the beginning of the story. This is especially true if you’re writing a character you’ve purposely made unlikeable, or who needs to be disliked by the end of the book.
Introducing a Potentially “Unlikeable” Character through Backstory
Claire from Kara Swanson’s “Heirs of Neverland” duology (Enclave Publishing, 2020 & 2021) is the type of girl you might think twice about starting a conversation with if you were to meet her without knowing a thing about her. She’s a loner. She’s not what society would call a natural beauty. And chances are she’d be more than ok with us ignoring her completely.
Or at least, that’s what she’d tell herself as she huddled in the corner with a worn-out copy of an old children’s book wondering why she’d agreed to come to an event where she clearly had no business being.
However, Kara expertly pulls us into Claire’s life within the first pages of Dust by showing us why she keeps herself apart from others, why she believes she is cursed, and what her core emotional wound is before launching her into the events that will transform her life—for good or for ill.
It’s because of the way that Kara presents Claire’s strengths and flaws (as well as the other characters she interacts with) that prevents readers from instantly dismissing her. Instead she creates a flicker of sympathy that grows into empathy that in turn leads readers into the heart of a character they can find kinship with, or to at least recognize a resilient young woman whom they grow to respect.
Your Turn!
If you have critique partners or beta readers coming back to you and telling you that they aren’t connecting with your characters or that they find them unlikeable, it may be because those characters still have a history that needs to be fleshed out on and off the page. Before you go back to your revisions, ask your test audience what it was about your character that they found off-putting. If you get responses that are similar, you’ll know where to begin (and that’s usually at the beginning)!
You might also consider free writing or “chatting” with your character about the following questions:
Is there a trauma or tragedy from your character’s past that is influencing how they perceive the world at the beginning of the story?
Is there a special need, a chronic illness, or a misconception they have about themselves that affects how they respond in a given situation?
What happens in the opening scene that might be triggering one of their defensive responses? How might those triggering events escalate throughout the story, forcing the character to grow in healthy responses or retreat into unhealthy responses as the plot unfolds? (Hint: They’ll need to fail multiple times before they can succeed if they’re going to be a “hero” and they’ll need to come to a place where they completely reject the path to healing/restoration if they are destined to be the “villain.”)
By having a better understanding about what’s happened to your character off the page, you’ll have a better chance of introducing the character to your reader on the page in a way that shows readers that there’s something relatable to be found in even the most unlikeable character.
—Jen
Do you have any questions or thoughts about this post? Let chat in the comment section below! Comments are moderated, so your comment may not show up immediately. Don’t worry! I get instant notifications and will respond to legitimate comments as soon as possible!
Additional Resources:
The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma, Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi (Writers Helping Writers, 2017).
The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface, Donald Maass (Writer’s Digest Books, 2016).