Great characters are key to keeping reader glued to your story

Huckleberry Finn, the young swashbuckling ragamuffin from Mark Twain’s iconic classic, Huckleberry Finn, bewitched me.

I was in a stern boys’ high school at the time, weighed down by what I considered tough school rules (almost everything was forbidden!). And food was never enough!

When I read the novel, I was spellbound that a boy that was about my age could live such a carefree life; free from school and societal rules, stealing watermelons and chickens whenever hungry and taking boats to go rowing for fun.

Forgetting it was a work of fiction, I would have gladly changed places — trading my drab life for Huckleberry’s adventurous ride down the Mississippi River. 

Years later, I was mesmerised by another character from Ho Thien’s poem, ‘Green Beret,’ in which a 12-year-old boy “with the eyes of a hurt animal” is haunted by war when he witnesses the execution of his father by the United States Army Special Forces (Green Berets).

When the shots rang out, and his father had fallen dead, the 12-year-old “crouched down and shook with tears, as children do when their father dies”.

Huckleberry (‘Huck’) and the nameless boy from Ho Thien’s poem are very vivid to me. Effective prose paints characters that give us an illusion of intimacy; as if it’s people we know from real life or knew from the past; standing on the door, beckoning us to follow them to their world of endless adventure.

In non-fiction, the characters are real ‘flesh and blood’ people like in Ann Hood’s heartrending true story, Of Reach, in which Hood, a young woman, suddenly loses her five-year old daughter (Grace). When she returns to her empty New York City apartment, she is accosted by painful memories: “Grace’s art projects littered the floor. Her laundered clothes waited to be put away. The contents of her back-pack… a book, a paper on which she’d counted tens all the way to five hundred — and her shoes tossed by the door and her ballet bag and her lunchbox, all of it out there. New York didn’t matter. Nothing mattered… I locked myself in my bedroom…” The inconsolable mother in an empty nest is unforgettable. 

It reminds one of Tony Mochama’s poem, ‘Mother’s Day’ appearing in What If I am a Literary Gangster, where the narrator remembers his mother on the eve of Mother’s Day: “Last night was Mother’s Day, come a dozen years too late and thirty years and fifty one weeks since, I, weak and covered in her fluids… Now mom, you are bones interred under a banana grove grave… some afternoon, soon — or in thirty or forty or fifty moons, I shall join you... You are always alive, just yonder o’er, the horizon, that marks Kisii…”.

CONNECT EMOTIONALLY

Readers are easily swept in by such grieving characters; somehow bruised characters mirror something bruised in us.

Characters are the tools a writer uses to emotionally connect with readers. A novel without compelling characters is incomplete — like a one-handed clock that can’t tell the time.

The characters must be grown to a point where the reader starts caring about what happens to them.

The writer should also remember that there are two main types of characters: a protagonist and an antagonist.

The protagonist is the main character around which the entire story revolves while the antagonist is the main character’s opponent. The clash between these two keeps the readers glued as they wait to see who will eventually ‘win’.

One of the techniques writers can use to ramp up their readers’ interest is to make their characters want something bad enough; in the case of Mark Twain’s Huck, the writer makes him go out of his comfort zone in search of adventure.

And Huck keeps looking for new adventures and doing crazy things (like pretending to be a girl) and the reader cannot have enough of Huck’s idiosyncrasies.

Some novels are boring in some parts because the characters stop being adventurous or doing interesting things.

Whatever genre one writes, whatever the story is about, great characters are the key to keeping the reader hooked to the end of the story.