Boring Characters
Hello. My name is Blandy. My appearance is normal. My eyes, hair, and build are ordinary. My opinions are private. My feelings are mild. I have a job in an office where I work. For leisure, I either look outside or inside. Please don’t put pepper in my dinner. That’s too much spice.
Today, I will wake up, get out of bed, and prepare myself for the day. I will go to work. Then I will come home. I will interact with my co-workers and roommates in regular ways.
I am a boring character.
Your readers will fall asleep reading a story with boring characters. Let’s talk about how to avoid this!
Want a second pair of eyes on your manuscript to make sure your characters pass the boredom-check? Book an editing appointment with Amy today.
boring characters don’t connect with the reader
None of you would ever write Blandy. I know it. Blandy is so over-the-top forgettable, boring, and bland. The only thing you might remember about him is that he finds pepper—as in black pepper from the shaker, not pablanos or ghost peppers—spicy. Because that’s the one and only specific thing I told you about him, and the only thing he seemed to care about.
But it can be really easy to let our protagonists creep into Blandy territory.
Boring characters are the kiss of death in a manuscript. Your world can be creative and descriptive, your magic system fresh and interesting, your plot full of twists and turns, your story tension high, your stakes as all-encompassing as the galaxy—but if you write boring characters, no one will care.
Readers want to connect with characters on a deep, emotional level. We want to see characters who are like us and who are wildly different. We want to understand why they make the choices they do, what matters to them, and why we should care about them.
There are three easy ways to do a boredom-check on your characters—choices, specifics, and growth. Let’s talk about how to avoid creating boring characters.
BORING CHARACTERS DON’T MAKE CHOICES
In discussing writing craft, we talk a lot about proactive characters. Essentially, this means, does your character make choices? I don’t mean whether they pick cereal or eggs for breakfast. I mean, do they make choices that affect the plot? Katniss volunteering as tribute for Prim, Jack Reacher ignoring orders to investigate an odd situation, Curious George following his curiosity. Making choices isn’t just important at the beginning of a story, setting the plot in motion. Think about Bella running away to protect her dad from vampires, Scarlett O’Hara scheming to survive, Frodo having to choose again and again to persist in his quest.
Characters who make choices are more interesting than characters who are along for the ride.
BORING CHARACTERS ARE GENERAL, NOT SPECIFIC
Sometimes we want to write an Everyman, a character all readers can identify with, and end up with a Blandy instead. Instead of a general Blandy, it’s better to make a character as specific as possible. Maybe our ordinary character with an ordinary job could be a tax accountant who is fed up with the slipshod work of her colleagues, who irons her Ann Taylor shirts and eats four ounces of steel-cut oats cooked in rice milk every morning, who always gives a folded five-dollar bill to buskers in the subway, who will send her order back to the kitchen if there’s even a speck of black pepper in it. This character could also be described as ordinary. She’s not larger than life, with James Bond skills or Elizabeth Bennett wit, but she feels real. She might sound annoying, but she won’t be boring.
Now, we don’t need a full rundown of every specific thing your character likes or does on the page. But if you spend time crafting someone full of preferences, habits, and idiosyncrasies, who comes from a specific economic, cultural, or geographic background, who makes choices and connects with others in specific ways—you’ll avoid casting a novel with boring characters.
One trap some writers fall into is crafting a Blandy main character who is at the center of the plot—but we never understand why. Why do all the women he meets fall in love with him? Why is he chosen to experience something great? Why do other characters’ wants and goals revolve around helping him and making him happy? We need to feel like a character is real and interesting enough to be worth spending two or three hundred pages with—and we need to see that reflected on the page.
BORING CHARACTERS DON’T CHANGE
Not all characters have to change. James Bond and Jack Reacher remain pretty static across many novels. They also have a lot of interesting, specific quirks and skills, and they are extremely proactive. But in general, characters with an arc of emotional growth are less boring than ones who remain the same.
This is especially true with main characters. We don’t need the nail technician or the experienced mage who aren’t on the page that often to experience emotional growth. But if our romance heroine or the chosen one setting out on a journey are the same person at the beginning of the manuscript as at the end … well, then why did we spend so much time with them? People change as their circumstances and choices evolve, and a character who takes an emotional journey isn’t likely to be boring.
We can even start with an unlikeable character, or someone bored or depressed, and take them on an emotional journey to come alive. This is a common story arc. But it can be hard to engage with a character who is bland and boring in the beginning unless that character makes some choices and feels like a real, three-dimensional person.
If you worry that your characters are inching into Blandy territory, look at their character arcs as a whole. Do they make choices that move the plot forward? Do they have specific personalities, appearances, and traits? Do they grow over the course of the manuscript? If you can answer yes to these questions, you can avoid writing boring characters.
Happy writing!
As an agented writer and highly experienced editor, Amy Wilson can quickly identify strengths and opportunities for growth in your character work, help you build a compelling submission package, and provide the encouragement you need to reach your writing goals. Take your writing to the next level with Amy’s professional eye.
