After Waterways came out, I heard several people make the same complaint: “why didn’t Kory go to [thing, redacted for spoilers even though the tenth anniversary edition of Waterways is four years old at this point] with Samaki?”
The underlying sentiment behind that complaint seems to be (I am not privy to people’s inner thoughts) “I wouldn’t have done that.” I feel like Kory’s decision is pretty well supported in the text, though I will admit that I wrote that fifteen years ago so it probably could’ve been done better. But I’m using this as an example of one of the two ways people approach relating to characters in fiction*.
*This doesn’t mean that everyone relates in either one way or the other completely. You can even switch mid-book as a character evolves.
“I wouldn’t have done that” is a very intimate way of relating to the character in a book. You’re putting yourself in the place of the main character so that the story is happening to you. A lot of times writers plan for this; you’ll often hear that side characters get to have more personality than the main character because the reader wants to identify with the main character, so they need to be less quirky in general. I think additionally that quirky behavior is fine in small (side-character sized) doses, but over the course of a novel it gets old in a main character, unless the quirk is the character trait they’re learning a lesson about. Even then, sometimes. Anyway, the point is, this is a way to immerse yourself in a book, but you then find yourself in situations where this character you identify with might do something that you personally would not, and that throws you out of the book.
Figuring out why characters behave the way they do is a more distanced way of relating to a text, but while it might be less visceral as an experience, I think it’s more important for growth. You’re getting to ride along with this character during a period of intense turmoil, and if you can empathize with them, that helps you build empathy for actual people going through turmoil in your real life.
Empathy, to simplify, means that instead of focusing on “I wouldn’t have done that,” you ask yourself, “in what situation might I do that?” or “what kind of person would I have to be to do that?” This exercise helps you imagine being in other people’s situations and even if you aren’t feeling the same things they are, being able to imagine feeling those feelings.
(This is different from sympathy, when you don’t relate to what someone is going through but you get that they’re hurting and you feel bad for their pain.)
When someone says, “I couldn’t relate to that character,” it indicates that they’re focusing on the differences between themself and the character. For a well-written character, there are or should be commonalities that we can focus on if we think about them. That goes for any character in a book, from the hero to the side characters to the villains. There are definitely characters I’ve had problems with because they started acting radically different at a certain point in the book and I didn’t buy the justification for it (if there was one). But if a character is written well and consistently, you should be able to find some human element to connect with.
That’s where this is going to turn from reading advice to writing advice. Writing can also be an exercise in empathy when you write characters that are not like you, which is something you’ll probably want to do at some point because even if you’re the most interesting person in the world, a book full of characters just like you is going to be a little stale. Writing a character who isn’t like you forces you to try to understand other people and relate to their motivations and intentions.
Characters written without empathy tend to become plot engines, existing only to move the plot along. If your answer to “why did this character do this?” is “so the plot can move to the next stage,” then you might want to revisit that character’s motivation. Even villains need to be more than just “someone opposing the hero for some reason.” It’s worth the time to figure out what those motivations are; it will make your story much more, you know, relatable.
You should be able to look at any (well-written) character in your work or other work and figure out some angle to relate to them. This takes some work, but it’s work that is worth doing not only for your story but for life in general.