When It Comes to Characters We Love, Vulnerability, Not Likeability, Is Key

Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas (@manzanitafire), an award-winning author, editor, and book coach.

Some writers believe that their protagonists must be likeable in order for readers to care about them.

And of course there’s some truth to that, which is why screenwriters adhere to a formula called Save the Cat: Having your protagonist do something kind or admirable or just generally awesome (like saving a cat who’s stuck up a tree) is indeed one path to your reader’s heart.

But the literary world is full of so-called unlikeable protagonists—the sort of people who not only fail to save the cat, but might have run it up the tree in the first place—that readers nevertheless care a whole lot about.

In fact, making your protagonist too good, paradoxically, is an excellent way to make your reader not care about them at all.

Not only because such characters don’t ring true (we all have our foibles and flaws) but because, generally speaking, we don’t turn to fiction for stories about perfect people.

What really makes us care about fictional people are the same sorts of things that make us care about real ones: understanding their soft, squishy underbelly, otherwise known as their vulnerabilities.

Here are three different types of vulnerabilities that will pave a trail straight to your reader’s heart.

1. Insecurities

What does your protagonist hide, and why? What are their weak spots and insecurities?

In Elizabeth Strout’s novel-in-stories Olive Kitteridge, the titular character is a cantankerous old gal who doesn’t care what anyone in town—or even her own husband—thinks of her.

But the person Olive loves most in the world is her son, Christopher, which makes him a vulnerability for her—and when she overhears Chris’s new wife making fun of her dress at their wedding, and implying that Olive will be a difficult mother-in-law, it cuts Olive to the core.

Up to this point in the novel, we’ve seen Olive act in all sort of atrocious ways to people. But no matter how much we’ve disliked her thus far, at this point in the story, our hearts crack open for her.

Why? Because this cutting comment is one aimed straight at her squishy underbelly, which we might think of as the missing scale in Olive’s armor—her insecurity over Christopher’s love. Because if the person Christopher has chosen to spend his life with thinks so little of Olive, perhaps she’s losing his love.

2. Fears

What is your protagonist afraid of? What is their secret fear?

In Kate Racculia’s YA mystery Bellweather Rhapsody, one of the protagonists, Alice, is established up front in a way that’s clearly unlikeable: She’s a 17-year-old drama queen, so sure of her eventual rise to fame as a singer that she’s keeping a journal for the exclusive use of her biographers after she makes it big.

But Alice has a vulnerability—the fact that the first boy she ever kissed dumped her—and, as the story progresses, we realize, a secret fear: That she’s not good enough to be a star. That she is in fact nothing, no one.

It’s the flip side of her megalomania, and it’s what makes us love her.

Because for Alice, she’s either destined for greatness or a waste of space here on this earth—and that’s such a hard, human, and ultimately relatable thing for a young person to believe.

3. Internal conflicts

In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning literary novel The Sympathizer (and its sequel, The Committed), the unnamed protagonist is a double agent during what Americans know as the Vietnam War—which is really about as unsympathetic a position as any imaginable.

Someone who’s loyal to your side, generally speaking, is a “good guy,” and someone loyal to the opposition may be good-hearted but misguided. But someone playing both sides? That’s a person lacking in any loyalties at all.

What makes us love this protagonist (beyond their inherently hilarious voice) is the fact that they genuinely see both sides in that conflict, in keeping with their multiracial heritage (half French and half Vietnamese). He believes in the communist rhetoric of kicking out the West and redistributing the wealth that Western colonizers have stolen … but he also loves American movies and music and the lofty ideals of democracy.

Talk about an internal conflict!

It’s the fact that the narrator is so conflicted about his loyalties—and his loyalties to his two best friends, who wind up on opposite sides of the war—that makes us love him, despite the terrible things he does.

These examples are pulled from three novels I happened to have close at hand. In reality, pretty much any novel you can pull off your shelf will showcase a fear, vulnerability, or internal conflict for the protagonist early on—because doing so does so much to pull the reader in and make us care.

So if you’re looking for ways to strengthen your characterization—or have received feedback to the effect that readers just don’t care all that much about your protagonist—turn to page one of your draft and ask yourself: Where in this opening can I establish vulnerability?

Susan DeFreitas

Susan DeFreitas is the author of the novel Hot Season, which won a Gold IPPY Award, and the editor of Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, a finalist for the Foreword INDIES. An independent editor and book coach, she specializes in helping writers from historically marginalized backgrounds, and those writing socially engaged fiction, break through into publishing.