5 Reasons Readers Don't Care About Your Characters

Imagine you get this note after someone reads your screenplay: "I just didn't connect with the characters."

It's a tough note to hear, because chances are you know everything about your characters. You know what they like, what they fear, how they grew up, and their favorite color and food and song. But no amount of character sheet creation or imagined backstory will help you if you aren't executing several basic story elements that will make your reader care about what's happening to them.

These are five reasons your readers might be tuning out, and what you can do to fix them.

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Your Character Wants Something, But We Don't Know Why It Matters

A character who wants to rob a bank is a good place to start.

A character who wants to rob a bank to support their girlfriend's gender affirming surgery is so much better.

A character robbing a bank because of an underlying desire to be loved, accepted, and to make others happy while also supporting their partner—that is incredible.

Readers connect when writers dig beneath surface wants to find emotional needs.

We don't all want to climb Mount Everest, but we all understand the need to prove ourselves or escape mundane reality. Your character's tangible goal means nothing if we don't understand the emotional need driving it. What does that bank heist actually represent?

Once you answer that, you've found your way in.

You're Telling Us Who They Are Instead of Showing Us

Too many writers create characters by listing qualities, like, "Sarah is brave, impulsive, and loyal." But we've just met this character. How do we know this? "Brave" means nothing until Sarah kicks down a door to save someone. "Impulsive" means nothing until she sets a house on fire to hide evidence.

As our character development guide explains, we need to see characters making choices that reveal who they are through action.

Robert McKee understood this when he wrote in Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, "True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure—the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature."

Stop describing your character as "resourceful" in their introduction and instead show them MacGyvering their way out of a problem in the opening scene. Let their behavior do the talking.

Every choice your character makes should be so specific to them that no other character would make it the same way.

Your Character's Arc Feels Arbitrary

Your protagonist starts as a cynic and ends as an optimist. Great!

But why? What specific events forced that transformation? Depth in storytelling comes from character, not plot, and that means your character's journey must feel inevitable based on who they are and what they experience.

Only Groundhog Day could have changed Phil Connors, because there's no way he could have experienced those events otherwise.

Does the change in your character feel earned? Or is it random, because you needed to get to the end of the story?

For example, do you need a good character to go bad just for a plot twist? Or vice versa? This happens in genre films like horror and action a lot. (I'm thinking specifically of Fast & Furious, although most people can forgive those movies' writing.) Most of the time, you aren't going to pull it off without laying groundwork first.

Director Akira Kurosawa wrote in Something Like an Autobiography, "Characters in a film have their own existence. The filmmaker has no freedom. If he insists on his authority and is allowed to manipulate his characters like puppets, the film loses its vitality."

Don't force story beats onto your characters. It won't feel right.

Character arcs shouldn't feel like they're serving your plot. Your plot should be the only thing that could force this specific person to evolve.

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You Don't Give Readers an Emotional Connection

Readers connect with characters when they understand not just what someone is doing, but why they're terrified, excited, or uncertain about doing it. We need to see the internal struggle that makes external action meaningful.

This doesn't mean flooding your script with voiceover. Find creative ways to reveal internal conflict through behavior, subtext, and other visual elements.

Your character might sit in their car for a long time before joining their AA meeting. Maybe they hang up in the middle of an important phone call because they misspoke. Maybe they smile through a funeral. All these things reveal something emotional about the character.

As Screencraft points out, audiences connect through empathy.

Give us a character's internal monologue without spelling it out. The most powerful way to reach an audience is through characters' emotions. The action becomes deeper and more meaningful that way.

You're Not Putting Characters in Impossible Situations

Readers don't want your character to succeed quickly or easily.

They want to watch your character face something so difficult, so painful, that they question whether this person can possibly overcome the obstacle.

If your obstacles feel manageable, why should anyone care? We want to see them make big, heartbreaking choices.

Do they betray their best friend to save their family? Do they sacrifice their dream to do the right thing?

You might love your plot, but if you're not putting your characters through absolute hell, you need to reconsider the stakes.

Make it hurt. Make it complicated. Then show us how this character comes through their trial. When we know what they want, why they want it, what's at stake, and wonder how they could possibly win, chances are we will be on their side.