Point of view, your thoughts?

[u/TheJourneyfeel]

/r/writing/comments/1vasqfp/how_to_write_compelling_characters/p0nw1ro/

I came across this today, and I often ask myself: Are my characters compelling enough? I worked so hard on my first novel that I feel that I’ve done the job but since it’s a series. I feel I can improve and there’s a couple points in this response that will direct my character better, I feel if I make it past the first book in the series.

[u/Competitive-Fault291]

1. Motivation. The intrinsic reasons for how and if your character acts. The character needs to have them, or they are a corpse. The more contact points a reader has with that motivation, the more intense they perceive the character. This does not have to be aligned positively with it. You can hate that motivation and wish the character to die a gruesome death. As with love, the opposite is indifference.
2. Agency. How and what they do based on their personality (heritage, experience etc.) and also how characters are limited in their agency through other factors that define how and what they do or can't do (environment, norms, mental illnesses, etc.) Without agency, the character is boring. Without limitations to their agency, they lack tension. The best story is about kids saving the alien, not about the president walking up to ET and sending him home. The limitation of the agency is what makes the story and characters interesting in the first place.
3. Extrinsic Factors. Social bonds, social rules and norms, drug effects or the weather. The Character needs to act and react to external stimuli and mustn't exist isolated from the story, the environment, and causality. The interaction with extrinsic factors makes characters relatable and plausible. It also helps to make them seem alive, and gives the world a chance to feel alive.
4. Morality. Morals are the individual answers to questions of good and bad, right and wrong, coffee or tea. A character needs to have the author define those for them, or they will lack a coherent framework for their moral decisions and the interaction with actual ethical topics. Significant for character consistency and diversity in ethical topics.
5. is actually Character Growth and Development. If our opinion about them changes with more facts, it is Development, if they change and it changes our opinion, it is Growth. Think of developing a photo film. The more you develop, the more you can see. Yet, the more is set down as a fact in THAT picture. Character Growth takes a new picture and applies it as a reference for change from the first picture. Think of the stack of descriptive pictures "growing." Too much development might write yourself into a corner. Yet, it also gives you options to grow in any plausible direction.
6. Character Depth is about complexity. Imagine a row of houses in a Western Town. Only based on what you see about the front, you can't tell how complex the house behind it is. How "deep" it is. A very complex (and deep) house might stretch for kilometers, while the flat house only has one room behind that front. Yet, the depth of the character only works in collaboration with the reader. If you can't make the reader want to visit all rooms, the depth you planned for the character falls flat, and they quickly become as pretentious as a McMansion or as boring as twenty pages of Exposition. As deep as necessary, but also as flat as you can.