: Re: How can I get readers to like a character they’ve never met? Okay, so in my story, a character goes missing, however you never actually meet them. How can I get readers to like them even

@Connie138

Warning: This answer contains a link to TV Tropes. Please be careful accordingly, or you will fall into a vortex and never return.
This literary trope is called "Posthumous Character," and although your character isn't actually dead (presumably), the same idea applies. You are trying to get your audience to like, understand and see a character who is not actually present in your narrative.
Therefore, this absent character will probably be developed entirely through flashbacks. This is hard to do properly, of course, and it has a big drawback - it has already happened, after all, so it can't really affect anything in your present-day plot. But if you're trying to develop a missing character, this is really the only tool for the job. Other, related options could be parallel story structure, where you tell both the current-day story and the past story of this missing character's adventures.
Movies do this "developing dead/absent characters through flashbacks" kind of thing all the time. When a character has a tragic backstory, i.e. a missing wife or deceased children, the movie will flash back to a time when those characters were alive, showing us how kind and loving the wife was or how wonderful the children were. You can mirror this kind of nostalgic flashing-back in your story, if you want to develop absent characters without actually having them be present.
However, are you sure doing this is a good idea?
Why you shouldn't always develop absent characters
Developing characters who a) aren't actually important to your narrative, b) will never show up, or c) are dead, is often, to put it bluntly, a waste of your time. Why spend your valuable word count developing a character who we will never get to meet? Why should your reader care about somebody who never appears except for flashbacks, doesn't help the protagonist in any way, and basically never affects the plot? I'm guessing that you could cut this character out of the story entirely and not affect anything at all, and that's never what you want.
(For reference, consider the Sexy Lamp Test. Could you replace your character with a lamp and have literally nothing change?)
To make the exploration of absent characters count, then, tie it to a character who is present. A dead wife isn't important to the story unless we learn how much her living husband misses her. A missing son isn't important to the story unless we know he makes our motherly protagonist cry at night. And so on.
In short: You can absolutely develop absent characters, using flashbacks and other tropes. However, be warned: without having a solid, strong narrative reason for why developing this absent character is important, all you will do by developing them is waste your time and word count. Your effort is probably better spent on your actual characters and protagonists, not one that the reader will never meet.

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