Making Unlikeable People into Likeable Characters (with April Ludgate)

septembercfawkes:

Unlikeable people can be a pain to write if they’re a main character. After all, our audience needs to like them enough to be around them for the course of the story. If our readers can’t stand them, they won’t want to read about them. But sometimes our protagonists are meant to be bad. They need to be bad. Heck, sometimes even the likeable people in our stories have jerk-qualities.

So how do we render their bad-qualities without driving our readers to throw our books across the room?

We turn our unlikeable people into likeable characters.

We make them such likeable characters, that the audience forgives, accepts, or overlooks that they are unlikeable people.

Here are six ways to do that.

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