Starting Your Novel With Character: 3 Strengths and 3 Challenges

Embarking on a novel with character at the helm can be a thrilling yet daunting endeavor. Discover the three key strengths this approach offers, and the three challenges you might face, to craft a compelling narrative that resonates with readers.

Natural strengths of each type of writer

Writers who start with character

• Empathetic people tend to be empathetic
• Characters with a compelling backstory and three-dimensional depth develop quickly
• Carry over characters from one book to another because they know them so well

Strength: Characters make us care

A twisty plot, compelling themes, and a fascinating setting are all great assets for a novel, but character is what makes us really care about the story

• Writers who start with character don’t struggle to create characters who seem alive on the page
• They only become more complex and compelling over multiple drafts

Lack of arc

Sometimes writers have so much love and sympathy for their protagonists that they have a hard time imagining a real flaw for that character, or some real issue in the way that person sees the world.

Strength: There’s a solid market for character-driven fiction

Writers who start with character generally don’t struggle to determine if there’s a market for the sort of thing they do, because that market is broad and well defined

• The vast majority of novels that fall into the genres of contemporary fiction, women’s fiction, and literary fiction are character driven

Challenge: Episodic or slow plot

Readers in general find deep character work compelling, but that doesn’t mean a novel can just rely on character to keep the reader turning the pages.

• A novel needs a causally linked series of events, with emotional stakes, that escalates over the course of a story to a distinct breaking point.

Strength: There’s no question whose story it is

For writers who start with character, this generally isn’t an issue

• These type of writers are not like directors looking for actors to play a part in their story-they’re more like directors making a biopic, with the story as a whole built around a certain character

Challenge: Too many POVs

Writers who start with character, whether they realize it or not, by adding many different POVs in their novels.

• Sometimes these other voices are just game trails that lead the story off on tangents without contributing anything in particular to the main story line.

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