Interesting characters

I'm not going to pretend that I know some kind of secret to writing interesting characters. If you've read just about anything I've written, you probably know better than to think that that could ever conceivably be true in the slightest. I have, however, on occasion made a character that people have been very interested in, and I wanted to talk about that.

The thing that intrigues me about it is that, without fail, the characters people find most interesting are the ones I never intend on using any longer. They are invariably one off characters that I want to leave mysterious, because knowing things about them is unnecessary. Their entire purpose is to be a person for the main character to interact with in a somewhat odd way, to give them something to think about and react to.

I wish I could say that that's information I could use to write more interesting characters, but what I get from it is that the less you know about a character, the more interesting they are. And there's probably some truth to that, and in theory you could use that information to your advantage, but there's one person you simply can't use it for: the protagonist.

The protagonist is the person that you follow throughout the story. That's what the word means. They're the main character. How are you going to follow that character and never say anything about them? How are you going to spend an extended period of time with them and never learn anything about them? They would stay mysterious, surely, but they would quickly become boring and robotic. They would have to never say anything, never do anything, never act in any way that might reveal something about their personality.

Then, of course, there's the secondary problem with having a mysterious character. People want to learn more about them. You call a character interesting because you want to know more about them. And when people want to know more about a character, you have two options: you can either oblige and reveal more about them, or you can ignore their requests.

The problem with the first choice is that, in revealing more about a character, you might ruin what made them interesting. Especially in situations where you didn't intend on using them anymore, as with my mysterious characters, trying to write more about them means that you are forcing yourself to write about them, rather than letting them write themselves. That makes the writing sound, fittingly, forced. Not only does whatever you say play a role on anything that happens to them in the future, but it also affects how people viewed what has already happened. By writing more for a character that wasn't supposed to be written about, you risk throwing away everything that they were.

However, by simply ignoring people's requests, you look as though you don't care about what your readers want, which is far from what you want to do. In fact, they might not realize it, but you might be intentionally doing it for the very reasons I stated above. You don't want to ruin the good you already have going.

It's a slippery slope in either direction. I have tried to concede to reader's requests and ruined what I had, and I have tried to ignore them and had interest in a story as a whole lost because of it. I have no idea how to properly approach the subject, nor how to balance it. However, having seen responses, it does make me want to play around with mystery more. I want to try and consciously make mysterious characters that will garner interest, rather than doing it accidentally.

Of course, that could end poorly. But it's worth a shot.