Ideas from Brandon Sanderson’s lecture on writing compelling characters.
According to Sanderson, there are 3 features of compelling characters:
- Proactivity
- Relatability
- Capability
However, not every character needs to have all of these features. Brandon’s rule of thumb is to have 1 feature where they’re strong, 1 where they’re weak, and another where they’re growing.
Proactivity
People tend to want to read stories with proactive characters…because they’re the ones that do stuff.