what do you think makes a character in a book 'easy to identify with'
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Answer:
Firstly, and most importantly, I relate most to characters when the authors haven’t tried really hard to make them “relate-able”. There’s nothing worse than reading a book with, say, a “strong young woman who makes funny quips but who’s also really vulnerable underneath”, and you can just tell that the author has poured all of their effort into writing this character purely to be “relate-able”. So, if you’re asking as a writer, my only piece of advice would be to stop trying to make your characters “relate-able” and just write about them as though they were people. Being people is what makes them relate-able, not cobbling together a set of affectations that you think people will like.
Speaking more broadly: I tend to relate to characters that are honest, wry, and face their struggles in a way that doesn’t feel contrived. Sometimes, this is a deliberate choice of the writer. I loved Jane (from Jane Eyre), Rosemary (from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves), and Addie Bundren (from As I Lay Dying), to pick three wildly different examples.
Sometimes, it happens incidentally - I’ll find myself relating to a villain or a peripheral character in a way that it doesn’t seem the author intended. Examples would include Ursula (The Little Mermaid), Sal Paradise’s aunt (On The Road), and Mammy (Gone With The Wind).
Ultimately, the most important factor is that the character seems real and multi-dimensional, especially when their identities/circumstances are similar to my own (obviously my antenna is up for realistic depictions of my own life experience, because it’s the one with which I’m most familiar). Characters that are imbalanced (obsessed with, say, having children or how they look, to the exclusion of all else in their fictional lives) or poorly fleshed-out stick out like sore thumbs in literature.
Explanation:
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