When you think about the books youโve loved over the years, usually the bookโs
characters are the reason why. Setting, tone, plot, and themes all contribute to
making a novel stand out, but I find that characters stick with the reader most.
In a good book, characters come to life for us. They are fully realized beings
we feel we know almost as well as any flesh and blood creatureโtheyโre not
always people, after allโin our own lives. For me, it is almost always a bookโs
characters that make me truly love it and remember it.
In my own book,
UP THE HILL TO HOME, every one of the main characters
is an ancestor of mine. They were real people. Often, Iโve read diaries and
letters that they wrote, and have heard many stories about them. Still, it was
up to me as an author to breathe life into them and make them completely
three-dimensional, and, I hope, memorable.
What are the traits that make a character memorable for you? Do you want your
characters perfect or flawed? Larger-than-life or Everyman? Exotic or familiar?
Letโs explore the five traits that make characters memorable.
1. Characters You Loveโor Love to Hate
Mysterious, scary, heroic, fascinating, aggravating, evil, charming, sexy: no
matter the character youโre looking for, the best ones get a visceral reaction
from their audience. It doesnโt even matter whether itโs โI
loved her!โ
or โOh, I
hated her!โ Think of
GONE GIRL. Author Gillian Flynn
went for and achieved the โlove to hateโ reaction in her readers, who couldnโt
wait for friends to read the book so they could discuss their enthusiastic
loathing of the characters without spoiling anything. The worst thing you can
ever say about a character is not that you hated him but that you found him
uninteresting.
2. Characters You Can Relate To
When a character is familiar to you, especially when she reminds you of a person
you already know and love, youโre primed to find that character memorable. Some
of the most memorable are the ones who remind us of ourselves. I think many
women identified with Bridget Jones, the hilariously flawed heroine of
Helen Fieldingโs BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY. As a kid, I
loved Jo in
Louisa May
Alcottโs Little Women primarily because she so reminded me of me, or
at least the โmeโ I wanted to be.
3. Characters Youโd Like to Know
Often a favorite character is one youโd really like to know in real life. You
can picture trading stories over a glass of wine or cup of tea or just having a
great conversation. As I got to know my own characters in
UP THE HILL TO HOME, I found myself wanting to spend
time with
Charley Beck, a funny, easy-going guy who takes life as it
comes. Itโs also not uncommon to fall a bit in love with that one character you
find oh so appealing. Edward Rochester, the mysterious and distant hero of
Charlotte Bronteโs
JANE EYRE, was the first character I ever remember swooning over.
4. Characters who are larger than life, perfect, or ideal
Many readers want to spend time with a character whoโs bigger or better than the
people they actually know; after all, as a friend said, โI spend all my time
with real people. I want to spend my reading time with someone better!โ Often,
these are the characters we find in genre fiction like romance (Rhett Butler),
spy (James Bond, Jason Bourne), and sci-fi/fantasy/dystopian lit (pick one). A
โperfectโ character can have flawsโtypically exactly the right flaws that make
him even more attractive.
5. Characters who are completely believable
This is the trait Iโm most often drawn to in books that I truly love, and the
one I strive to achieve when I write. I want to spend time with fully realized,
three-dimensional people. Perhaps my favorite character of all timeโand I know
Iโm not aloneโis
Atticus
Finch, hero of
Harper Leeโs timeless
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. For me, Finch hits all five of
these traits: weโre viscerally drawn to him, heโs someone weโd like to know,
heโs the best version of the person weโd all like to be, he is heroic in the
best sense of an everyday person who stands up and does the unpopular right
thing, and yet he is still completely believable.
Giveaway
Who are your all-time favorite characters? Leave a comment below to be entered
to win an ecopy of
UP THE HILL TO HOME.
Cherished only child of Charley and Emma Beck, she is the unlikely issue of an
improbable union. Beloved wife of Ferd Voith, she is the happy mother of a tribe
of nine, and newly expecting her tenth. It is the family of her earliest dreams.
Seven forty-one, the house that Charley built on his little plot of farmland
just outside of Washington City in the District of Columbia, is the only home
sheโs ever known. So vast before, the house seems to shrink with each new child,
until Charley wonders that theyโre not all tumbling out of windows.
In a ritual established over so many babies, Lillie celebrates by having Ferd
bring down her memory box, a carefully collected treasure of the lives of those
she loves. She knows by heart every word of the letters, every entry of the
diaries, every detail of the photographs, and she traces them again with the
start of each new life, to instill a sense of place, of family, of history.
Emmaโs miracle, Ferdโs universe, the beating heart of the household: When Lillie
is stricken in a fall, her memories tug at threads woven through a century as
the fabric of the family frays around her.
Jenny Yacovissi grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, just a bit farther up the hill
from Washington, D.C. Her debut novel, Up the Hill to Home, is a fictionalized
account of her motherโs family in the same region.
In addition to writing and reading historical and contemporary literary fiction,
Jenny is a reviewer for Washington Independent Review of Books and the
Historical Novel Society. She owns a small project management and engineering
consulting firm, and enjoys gardening and being on the water. Jenny lives with
her husband Jim in Crownsville, Maryland.
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