Populating your world with interesting, non-Blandy people can make readers care about your story, and writing relationships between characters can inspire them to ship, daydream, and root for your characters. This is true of all kinds of relationships—romantic ones, friendships, apprentice and mentor, rivals, enemies, co-workers. The different ways our characters relate to each other makes them come alive on the page as real, believable people.

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Learn from ROMANCE

If you’re working on a romance, you already know that the relationship between the two main characters is crucial to the novel as a whole. But listen up, everyone else: the importance of writing relationships between characters is NOT LIMITED TO romance novels. It’s a place where we can all learn a lot from good romance writers. The emotional arc of a romance starts with two protagonists who need something or someone in their lives, and it ends when they meet that need with each other. Every plot point is connected to that developing relationship, as they get to know each other, encounter both internal and external obstacles, and make decisions about their relationship.

But even in a romance, that web of relationships between characters matters. If our heroine Myrtle exists in a vacuum, without co-workers or roommates or a sister to confide in, and if our hero Merle doesn’t have parents or a boss or a barista to interact with, the story starts to get pretty boring. These side characters can often be used to illuminate the main relationship. For instance, Merle might see the future he wants when he visits his brother’s family, or Myrtle might decide no guy is worth the trouble when her roommate’s boyfriend betrays her. Crafting those relationships carefully, instead of throwing any old character into the protagonists’ lives, will illuminate the main themes, make the world of the story feel rich and realistic, and often offer some amusing or poignant side stories.

And Apply it Beyond…

So how does this apply to stories that aren’t romances?

Strong novels include emotional arcs. They might not start with loneliness and end with love, but they start in one emotional place and end in another. At the beginning of The Hunger Games, Katniss volunteers as tribute to save her sister in a selfless, heroic act—but she will do anything to survive. At the end, she is ready to sacrifice her own life to thwart the Capitol and challenge the system. That transformation is tied to plot points, yes—volunteering as tribute, entering the arena, building alliances, Rue’s funeral, and so on—but it’s also tied to her relationships with Prim, her mother, Cinna, Peeta, Gale, Rue, and President Snow. Would we find her transformation believable without Peeta or without Rue?

Writing relationships between characters also offers a chance to show a different side to a character. Cinna sees Katniss very differently than Gale does. Including a variety of relationships, rather than just a romance or just a best friend, shows us the many facets of someone’s personality.

The secret to writing relationships between characters is to let each character be a realistic, three-dimensional person with thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, and plans of their own. This does not mean that the reader needs to know a rich backstory for every single side character, or to know how they take their coffee and what their precise height is. It does mean that their dialogue, actions, and choices need to illuminate who they are. If you as the author know every character on a deep level, that knowledge will come through in the word choices and decisions that character makes.

Some Homework for Writing Relationships Between Characters

When I’m plotting a story, one exercise I find helpful, especially when I have more than one main character, is writing my characters’ names on a sheet of paper and then drawing lines that represent their connections with each other. This can identify characters who don’t have enough to do, like the neighbor who only knows one character and whose role can be filled by a best friend stopping by. I look for plot opportunities to connect characters in a variety of ways. Writing relationships between characters, that can grow and develop over the course of the manuscript, rather than brief interactions, makes the reader care more deeply about them. Happy writing!

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