Don't care about your characters?

If you find that you don't care about or can't relate to your characters that probably means your characters could use a little more development. If your characters are too perfect or too flawed they'll come off as unrealistic and boring. The problem may also be that while your characters are interesting, they don't have enough background for their traits to make sense, or you don't know them well enough to care about them.


One way to build characters is through their reactions to plot points, it will allow the reader to know the type of person the character is.  For example, if someone close to your character dies, how do they react? Do they get angry, sad, do they suffer in silence? This is also a great way to build your characters because, losing someone close to you can change a person, maybe now your character develops a drug addiction in order to cope or they become walled off.

 Make sure your characters have strengths and weakness, this goes for the protagonist, antagonist, and all supporting characters.  Your hero should not be all good and your villain should not be all bad; your reader needs to know your characters strengths, weakens, fears, and quirks. Remember that nobody's perfect and that most villains don't think that what they are doing is evil, or they have reasons for doing those evil things; you should try and convey this in your writing.

Perhaps the reason that you don't care about your character, is that you don't know them very well. A good way of fixing this is to give your character background! Let's say your character is an extremely determined person, but he's also horrible at trusting people.  Your reader needs to know why. For example, let's say he was raised in a bad home, his mother beat him and his three other siblings constantly, and he and his siblings were always hungry; because of this he was determined to never have to live in that situation again, but because of his abusive mother, he finds it hard to trust people.

Another way of getting to know your character is to find out their personality type, there are 16 different personalities and you should know your characters' type.  This will help you to understand how they interact with the world around them. Is your character an introvert? Then they are probably not the life of the party.

Finally, understand the little things that make your character special. What music do they like? What's the weirdest thing about them?  Do they keep a diary, or an old teddy, does teddy have a story? These things will make your character much more believable. If you start to feel like your character is a real person, then you’re doing great!

Here are some resources I found that might help.
http://thewanderingquille.blogspot.com/2016/06/pick-up-bad-habit.html
http://www.phobia-fear-release.com/phobia-dictionary.html
http://yeahwrite.co/post/24774343500 
 http://personalitytype.com/career_quiz?type=1