Writing What People Love Without Sounding Like Everyone Else

People expect certain things when they pick up a book. 

Obviously, they expect to enjoy it. They expect to care about the main character. They expect to laugh, to get angry, to be satisfied at the end (well, most of the time). As the all-powerful author, you should do your very best to give people what they expect. You want your readers to be happy they read your book. 

There are some classic things that readers love in a novel. They're easy to stick in your book, but it's not so easy to cut and paste in a well-rounded character, or a full character arc in one paragraph. 

Here's a few ways to write people love without sounding like everyone else. 

Combine Characters

The wise teacher. 

The best friend. 

The antagonist. 

I bet you can think of countless examples of those three characters in your favorite novels. Chiron from Percy Jackson, Ron in Harry Potter, and Darth Vader are a few I pulled off the top of my head. You might not have all of these type characters in your novel, but you should have at least one.  The thing about these character archetypes, while we love all the Rons and John Watsons, is that sometimes they get a little old. The slightly doubtful best friend that always shows up when needed and sticks by the hero, is a character that shows up over and over again. 

As is the wise old sage. And of course, every story has an antagonist. 

But we need these characters! Our stories would not be the same without them. 

So what do we do to make these desperately needed characters a little less faded, and a little more extraordinary? 

Combine them. 

The best friend could also be the antagonist (this could be an interesting twist). 
The love interest could be the wise teacher. 

Or have the teacher turn into the villain (this happens a lot in the Spiderman movies, I've noticed). *

That snarky, pessimistic character that loves to make the hero feel bad about himself? What if she was the best friend? 

I'm sure you can come up with a few more interesting combinations. 

Combining characters can improve your story in several ways. It gets rid of unneeded characters, and makes the characters you do need better. They're more realistic, they have more motivation, and they're more lovable. 

Go Easy on the Love Story

Everyone loves a good love story. Even if there's not a love interest in the book you're reading right now, I bet there's someone you ship the main character with. I always wanted Trixie Belden and Jim to get together, but that never really happened. 

And #Dramione. No thanks to J.K. 

Sometimes love interests can go a little overboard, though. And, I don't know about you, but once my ship becomes canon, I get a little bit bored. 

So my advice with love stories is this: 

Unless you are purely writing a romance novel, keep your love interest on the back burner. This works even better in a series. Let it simmer, let people get invested in the relationship before the two characters even know they like each other. Then, boom! At the end of the book (or series) bring the two characters together. 

In the middle, you can do a little teasing. A little dancing around the attraction, but be sure to never address it directly. You lose momentum and interest. And don't do too much teasing, either. Then you can be in danger of changing subplot to main plot. 

Just be careful, and be smart. Stoke the fire, but don't let it burst into flame. 

(Why do people use so many cliches when talking about love? I can't even write a paragraph about it without using 200,000 really stupid ones.)

Don't worry too much about humor. 

Getting the humor right in a story has always been really tough for me. I'm extremely sarcastic in real life, so I can easily make my characters be sarcastic, but not everyone thinks sarcasm is as humorous as I do. And also, in a book, a little bit of sarcasm goes a long way. 

But truly hilarious scenes and characters are hard to craft. Countless times, I've spent so much time trying to make a scene as funny as possible, but when I read back over it, it seems very contrived and flat and not funny at all. 

So unless you're trying to write an actual humor book, my advice to you is this. Don't worry too much about it. Most likely you'll write a few lines that will make people smile, but if you don't, that's okay. The Hunger Games didn't have any laugh out loud scenes, but there were a few lines that I thought were pretty funny. Obviously that book did pretty well. 

So don't spend a lot of time trying to infuse humor into your book. Most likely your sense of humor will come out in your writing anyway, and even if you did pour a lot of time making a scene absolutely hilarious, what's rolling-on-the-floor-laughing funny to you, may not be funny at all to someone else. 

Humor is very selective, so your kind of humor is not going to be funny to everybody.
Overall, just don't worry about it too much. If you have a couple of funny lines, you should be fine.


So there's three things you can do right now to help with editing, or maybe they will give you some help with a new project.
How do you change your writing to make classic characters and plots different? Did you think of any different character combinations? Let me know in the comments! 

*Having a backstory for your villain helps them seem more real, and might also get some of your readers rooting for the villain. When Joss Whedon wrote the script for Thor, I'm sure he didn't anticipate his villain, Loki, having such a large group of fans. This might have something to do with Tom Hiddleston's portrayal of the character, but a lot of it is the struggle we see Loki has. He's the outsider. He doesn't feel appreciated, or loved. It's easy to see how someone who is very insecure and uncomfortable could turn to the wrong person for acceptance. So don't be afraid to make your villain slightly pitiable. Just make sure to keep them a little despicable, or they might turn into the protagonist.