How to Make Me Care Part 1: Big Series with Immersive Worlds

I’ve been wondering lately about what, exactly, it is that makes a reader care. About the characters. About the world. About the stakes presented in the story. Because there are a lot of stories that will present huge stakes and have decent prose and do a lot of stuff right, but they still don’t manage to make me care at all. On the author end I may care a lot about a certain character, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to write about them in a way that makes the reader care.

And of course every reader is different.

Maybe this is just another way of procrastinating on my actual writing, but I kind of want to explore some of the things that make me, personally, care when I’m reading a book. Things that pull me in and make me invested. Like I said above, every reader is different, but I’ll start with my own personal preferences and then see if I can take a step back and generalize them somehow.

I’ll begin my exploration by choosing a few of the books or series that I enjoyed the most and trying to think about what made me love them so much. In this first post I’m going to start by exploring some of the bigger series books I loved that have immersive world-building and trying to pick out how the authors made me care in these big, epic settings.

The Hobbit

There are a lot of things that I liked about The Hobbit, and I’m so glad it’s been a while since I read it because this will make it easier to pull out the things that stuck with me.

• The narrative style that feels as if it’s being told as a fireside story to a younger audience, with all the little reassuring “he missed his pocket handkerchief, but not for the last time” type statements.
 
• Bilbo is reluctant to go on the quest, but clearly he has a secretly buried curiosity/longing for adventure
 
• The world-building and the way they explore it with a sense of wonder, there are all kinds of moments that stand out in my memory because they interacted with cool monsters like trolls or giant spiders, etc, and I still remember the way I imagined them (movies don’t exist, lol) very vividly
 
• The way Bilbo, who’s basically an underdog character, develops and becomes a hero among so many other more competent people
  

Lord of the Rings

Lord of the Rings has a very different writing style than the Hobbit. Much more serious and dense. Lots of longer descriptions. And there’s no narrator to reassure us that the main characters will get out of this alive at the end. In a lot of ways it’s a very different type of story from the Hobbit, and I like it for different reasons.

• The first thing that popped into my mind here was the Strider section of the story. It’s at the beginning of the Hobbits’ journey, they’re just starting to realize how scary the world is and that they are being chased by all kind sof things from Nazgul to evil humans, and then Strider creepily shows up and they’re so scared of him. And the reveal that he’s actually on their side is so reassuring - someone competent is with them.
 
• For some reason the cities and locations have captured my imagination a lot as well. From Rivendell to Minas Tirith to Moria, all these places create a sense of wonder and awe and make the world feel so real and so worth exploring. Again, it’s that sense of adventure and Middle Earth being so realistic and so vast.
 
• The underdog characters. I’m talking about Pippin, who starts off goofy and useless and is forced to kind of grow up. I’m talking Eowyn who is desperate to prove herself and fight against evil. I’m talking Sam who has a very cool hero moment when he wears the ring (which wasn’t really shown in as much detail in the movie). Alot of these characters aren’t just underdogs who have goals and motivations they also grow as they’re exposed to different things.
 
• The heroic characters that stand against evil and temptation. We see those who succumb to their desires like Boromir, but we’re also shown that it’s possible to have such moral character that you can resist the temptation of power like Faramir did in the book.

Harry Potter

This series is another one that I’ve read many, many times and enjoyed immensely. I was one of the people browing the internet for fan theories and predictions as we all waited for the next book to come out. So clearly, no matter what you think her faults are, J.K. Rowling did somehow manage to engage me and hundreds of other characters and capture our imaginations.

• The world-building and sense of wonder. This whole idea of the ordinary world hiding an entire Wizarding society with castles, magical creatures, flight, and all kinds of other things made for some great world-building.
 
• The humour. I loved it. From the very first chapter, which centered around the weird things that happened to Harry as a child, from random weirdly dressed wizards congratulating him in the street to his hair growing uncontrollably after bad haircuts, to the times he accidentally ends up on the school roof. And then of course this humour, with the characters being put into ridiculous situations, Harry rudely talking back to Snape, the pranks that are pulled on Umbridge as revenge, etc. But it’s not just in the funny situations that these books portray. There’s also humour in the way things are said sometimes. I should probably go back and find an example of these funny turns of phrase...
 
• The growth. These books showed the growth of Harry and his friends in the Wizarding world, they also get darker in tone to go along with this, and we get to see a growth in the complexity of the stories being told and the themes that are explored. In the first book the main plot revolved around the evil wizard that had literally possessed one of the teachers and sought the Philosopher’s stone and the trio are literally just living their lives as Hogwarts students and incidentally picking up on the clues. But if you keep reading there’s a lot more introspection, a lot more focus on Harry’s inner struggles, conflicts even with his friends, realizing his parents had some issues and weren’t neccessarily the best people ever, etc.
 
• The side-characters. I’m one of the people that got annoyed by Harry eventually, but there was also someone else in the periphery that kept the stories interesting. Ron was a big one, but even Draco, for example, had some great struggles and character growth in his side-story in the sixth book. Hagrid, Snape, Neville, RAB, etc, all had great stories that were worth exploring and wondering about as well.

The Agartes Epilogues by K. S. Villoso

This is a recent find that I’ve been talking about almost endlessly. It’s just that good. And there’s a lot to love in this series, so much that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

• The rich, diverse world-building. When I say rich I mean there are all kinds of different lands from the huge empires, to the tiny little lands to the once-great Jin-Sayeng. And each one has its own cultures, views about magic, laws, and ways of life. It’s amazing how much world-building was packed in to this trilogy and how many little moments of simple characters living their lives were used to build the world so effectively.
 
• Kefier. I’m not going to lie and say the characters in general. I mean most of them were great. I just loved Kefier, ok. He was a normal dude in the middle of the world ending. This guy literally did not care about all the crap that sorcerers, rich people, and powerful people convince themselves is important. He didn’t care about the magic or the creatures or the mysteries. He just cared about his found family and it was beautiful.
 
• The pain that the characters go through. Usually, my level of care is inversely proportional to the scale of the conflict. The bigger the stakes, characters, and powers are the less I care. That’s why the stakes in this book were so on point. The author made us care about the characters and then threw them into situations that seriously made them suffer. The stakes were personal.

The Chronicles of Adalmearc by D. E. Olesen

I spent so many awesome afternoons reading the first book in this series and by the time I finished I was hooked and knew I would wait eagerly for each book in the series to come out. I re-read the first book when the second was about to come out and look forward to re-rerading both again when the third comes out. So what makes me want to visit this world again and again?

• The characters. This book features all kinds of characters. At first, it’s the two young orphans Adalbrand and his sister Arndis and their need to find a way to secure their futures that kind of gripped me. I wanted them to be OK, because unlike all the other power-hungry people these two characters had an actual need and had a sincerity that others lacked. Eventually, as the book progressed I loved the way that we were shown different characters with different moral choices on different sides of the conflict and were able to sympathize with and understand them all simultaneously, even when they were against each other. The author pulls off something impressive and unique in the way he handles the characters.
 
• The details that went into the setting. You have some of the hallmarks of high fantasy. Knights, castles, wars, etc, but this is nothing like the typical. There’s a detailed political system that we get to see with all kinds of power-plays and rules. There’s a power-imbalance because the High King is dead and the remaining powerful players have to work within the political system, deciding on matters through a Thing, a meeting where each lord or earl or royal has a vote. They have to make alliances and sway other key players to their opinions so they can win the vote. It’s a very detailed and complex system and works really well, especially since not everyone plays by the rules and their plans often backfire.
 
• The descriptive battles. Not only are we invested in the battles due to the presented inside and outside threats to the cities and realm as a whole, but we’re also invested in them because we can picture them so well and understand the possibilities and try to guess at the manouvers that might be used to turn the battle’s tides. One section that stands out to me in particular is the description of a city, which is so detailed and so vivid that it later allows me to completely picture what’s happening when there is inner strife and attacks on the castle and a seige. Great stuff. And this is coming from someone who usually doesn’t lean towards detailed description, but the author has proven with these books that description can be excellent when done well.

TL;DR: By examining all these big series with expansive worlds it seems that there a few things that can get me invested enough in the story to continue on with a series including:

• Character growth. Characters who have goals and motivations, especially underdog characters who grow into a more heroic role.
• Characters with principles. Characters who will stick to certain principles and not be swayed by evil.
• Character-based, personal stakes featured in the story. When the stakes are world-ending that’s nice, but it won’t pull me in unless the stakes are dealt with on a character level. Is a character I love going to lose their loved one? Is a character I’ve been rooting for going to fail at their quest? Is a family going to get torn apart? Those are the kinds of things that make me care about the “danger.”
• Characters with differing views, voices, and contributions and motivations all interacting together in interesting ways.
• Characters who are competent.

• Worlds that feel large and worth exploring with many distinctive locations
• Worlds with a variety of diverse cultures and magical creatures and political systems and ways of life.
• Political systems and power-dynamics and laws that actually feel complex and make the characters work hard before they can hope to achieve their goals.
• Descriptions that give me enough detail to be able to follow and understand the manouvers in battles, thereby understanding the danger or potential that exists for a battle and increasing my engagement with the stakes of the battles.
 
• A unique narrative voice that can add something magical in the way things are described whether it’s humour, sarcasm, or a cozy, storyteller like vibe, or whatever.

A series can have one or two or all of the above things, the more the better, and that will make it much more immersive and engaging for me when I’m reading it and much more likely to follow up on the series and read it all the way though and even wait years for the books or read them more than once.

On the other hand, if a book fails to have enough of these elements I can check out pretty quickly and even if I do finish it I am unlikely to pick up the next one in the series.

Well, I hope you all enjoyed that rambling to a certain extent. I plan to do another, similar post on this topic that tackles some stand-alone books in a wider variety of genres and subgenres including some sci fi and steampunk novels. It’s certainly an interesting excercise as a reader and I think it’s even more interesting for me as an author because I obviously strive to make the readers care about my books!