Hi Hikari and welcome.
Sometimes my characters feel forced too. This happens especially when I start with a plot idea and fit characters to it. A rigid plot allows the characters no room to react, to challenge each other or to pursue their broader interests. Often this means that the characters' personal stories don't end satisfactorily and worse from my perspective, the story's themes feel weak (because themes are grounded in character arcs). Often I don't detect the problem until a really tense scene where I expect characters to act a certain way, and it doesn't feel credible. Then I go back to the early scenes and realise that motivations were floundering there too.
It used to be that weak characterisation was not an impediment to publication. Pulp literature of the 1930s-1950s is full of stories that are mainly plot and situation-driven. You can see this in crime stories, fantasies, science fiction stories, westerns. These days though, I think it's a hard sell for anything but (say) action-movies and B-grade horror.
My solution?
- Don't plot until your characters are well-defined
- Ensure that your characters are laden with contradictions. Flat, monochromatic characters can never suffer dilemmas, never doubt or regret. They're hard to manipulate or provoke and they don't react in interesting ways. They also have no mystery; nothing to reveal
- Research your characters thoroughly. Know their backgrounds, their best and worst moments; their strengths, their insecurities, their morals and foibles. Turn them from puppets into people. Write mini-stories about them. If you can't invent such things from whole cloth then model them on real peole. If you don't care whether a character had one sibling or two then you're not interested enough. Mess up the history with contradictions until it is interesting.
- In each scene ensure that each character has a strong personal reason to be there: some objective that it will either achieve or fail in. Give every character in every scene either something difficult or risky to do, or a dilemma to decide on. Let them be changed by what happens.
- Don't be inflexible about the plot. Sometimes characters will go in better directions than you initially think.
- Be willing to be slower, more confused, less efficient in your writing for a while. For some writers (and I'd be one), characters can be the most demanding elements of a story. (Eventually, you'll get more efficient at dealing with them)
Good luck!
