Make Them Human

You will fall in love with my protagonist. She is beautiful, she is smart, she is popular, she is wealthy, she is successful, everyone wants to be like her. In short, she is perfect. Which therefore makes her completely un-relatable and makes the reader want to throw the book into a burning fireplace. Your characters are human and therefore they have flaws. Of course you love your characters, even the unlikeable ones, but it is easy to make your protagonist too perfect in an attempt to make them the hero. Particularly if on some level they are a reflection of you. But it’s the imperfections that allow conflict to occur in the first place, which is the only way a story progresses. Think about the people you love, they have a suite of traits you adore about them. Yet they also have a handful that cause you to complain to others, to want to bang your head against a wall and to make you pick fights with them. It’s the same with your characters. What are their weaknesses? What annoys you about them? What faults do they have that causes them to trip up again and again. In thinking about your characters remember to make them human.