Emotional Connections to Your Characters

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I feel that in order to create a good story, you have to love the characters you create. I have difficulty feeling emotionally connected with my own characters; learning to love them. Whenever I come up with them, I feel like they are just mere tools to use in telling the story - they don't seem to "come to life" for me. I feel bad for not feeling emotionally connected with the characters I come up with - like a parent who doesn't love their own child.

On the other hand, I have absolutely no problem feeling emotionally connected with characters from my favorite movies or TV shows. Sometimes I can start to feel emotionally connected with a character even when I don't know much about them at first. I've had imaginary friends practically all my life, and virtually every single one of them have been derived from the movies/TV shows I obsess over. One imaginary friend who I got from a movie stayed with me for 6 years.

The only time I feel an actual emotional connection to my own characters is when I create them as the hypothetical children of existing characters from my favorite TV shows and movies. I feel like it's easy to love them because they have their parents' blood running through their veins. I already love their parents, so why shouldn't I love them too?

Can anyone else relate to what I'm going through? What are some ways that I can learn to feel for the characters who I come up with?

I don't think forming an emotional connection to your characters is as important as it seems. What's truly important is making them well rounded... flawed. Real. I've found that to do this I have to put just a bit of myself into each one. The protagonist, antagonist... etc. They're all extensions of me and my world views.

Trying to do otherwise results in 1 dimensional characters that nobody can relate to.

Watch less TV and movies and read instead.

Until you have read books with characters you love, I don't see how you can write good characters. Could someone who doesn't view movies & TV screen write? See what I mean?

As TEGH said, I put a bit of myself into my characters. If I don't, there's no way I could portray them properly. I need to relate to them in some way or another. Human personalities are complex; the same should apply to your characters' personalities. Put in as much as you can, give them depth.

This can actually cause problems if you overdo it. If you're too emotionally attached to your characters, you risk making them one dimensional and unrealistically flawless. If anything, my own challenge is making the characters I like so much well-rounded and realistic while still keeping them sympathetic.

It may take time to fully develop the character. And with that development will hopefully come an emotional attachment with him, her, or it.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer