Why Readers Fall in Love With Characters, Not Plots

Hello, dear readers,

If you spend any time on social media and follow book-related content, especially BookTok, you've probably noticed something interesting. People rarely talk only about a book's plot. Instead, they talk about the characters.

They create fan art of them. They admire them. They argue about them. They fall in love with them.

The term "book boyfriend" wouldn't be nearly as popular if those characters weren't written so well.

And that's a very good indication of where a reader's attention truly lies.

Characters are what make us emotionally attach ourselves to a story.

As both an author and a ghostwriter, I've heard hundreds of story ideas over the years. Very often, it's the premise that grabs my attention first.

For example:

"In a land where darkness has consumed everything and the sun has disappeared..."

With just one sentence, we're already intrigued. But what will make us care about that land and the people living in it are the characters. Because we experience the world through them.

And let's not forget that human beings are social creatures. We need one another. We feel empathy more deeply than almost any other species precisely because we feel so intensely. That's why we care about characters. That's why they sometimes begin to feel real.

Because at their core, they are people just like us.

A good plot is the hook. It's the strong foundation that makes a reader pick up a book in the first place.

But readers stay for the characters.

To create a character that readers will truly love, that character needs to feel like a real person.

That means having flaws. Not always communicating perfectly. Making mistakes. Feeling insecure. Occasionally making bad decisions.

There need to be layers beneath the surface.

It's not enough to say a character is the brave one, the quiet one, or the confident one in the group.

Real people are never that simple.

When I was writing my novel The Puppet King, it was incredibly important to me that my protagonist, Alistair, felt authentic to the reader. To everyone around him, he appears rebellious. A prince who refuses to be controlled. Someone who always knows what he's doing.

But internally, the reader sees a completely different picture.

They see a person who constantly questions his own decisions. Someone who is afraid to show weakness because he knows others might use it against him. Someone desperately trying to hold on to even a small sense of control over a life that feels predetermined.

And that's what I believe truly brings characters to life, not their strength, not their titles, not their special abilities, but their contradictions

Because that's where they begin to feel real.

And maybe that's why, years later, we often forget the details of a plot, but never forget the characters who made us feel something.

If you’d like to follow the journey of the book I am writing and see how it’s coming together, you can find more here:

Click Me

But if you want to, you can see more about my work as a ghostwriter here:

Click Me