Hello, Mary Sue! Goodbye, plot.
Perfect characters are boring as hell.
Really, they are. Think about it…when the main character is physically gorgeous, runs faster, jumps higher, knows every trick, can pick a lock with his nose while blindfolded and never loses a fight, why bother reading any farther? The excitement of reading a good story is the thrill of not knowing what’s around the corner.
The trouble for some writers, in the beginning, is the love we have for our characters. “Look at this fabulous person I created!” we think. “She’s so amazing, she must be able to do everything I wish I could do in real life.” It’s okay to feel that way. Ask any mother if her baby isn’t the most perfect creature ever born. *laughs* But loving your character isn’t what makes a story great. The best characters aren’t the ones who sail through the events of the story as easily as they might walk down their hallway. No, the characters we stick with are the ones who make mistakes, trip over branches, lose their way, get thrown in prison for crimes they didn’t commit and worry about whether they’ll live through the night. A character who has no flaws can’t change and grow. Did you read Gone With the Wind? Whose story was more compelling - Scarlet’s or Melanie’s?
I fell into the trap myself, some years ago. I was writing Kestrel as a Mary Sue - a character who could do everything better than everyone else, and couldn’t be defeated. When I finally started digging deeper, looking for the feelings Kestrel must have been feeling to drive her on her journey, I was amazed at how much better the story became. These days, I watch carefully to make sure none of my characters are superpeople. They’re jealous, quick to anger, grumpy in the morning, superstitious, impatient and greedy. My friend, writer Lisa Mantchev, was talking about this very thing, and challenged us to share our character’s flaws. So today I challenge you - and I’ll begin.
Kestrel, a pirate, a fighter and a beginner in the use of magic, is FLAWED.
- She is slow to trust, and quick to believe the worst in people
- She is fearful of the magic, even though it’s a natural part of her.
- She is stubborn, sometimes to her detriment.
- She doesn’t believe she’s worthy of love or admiration.
Your turn! Tell me, in the comments, the ways in which your character is scarred and layered and real.
Nice post, Misty!
Besh, one of the lead characters in THE SORCERERS’ PLAGUE and THE HORSEMEN’S GAMBIT, is an older man, widowed, drawn out of the comfort of his final years by a catastrophe that he can’t ignore. His faults?
– He’s terribly stubborn.
– He’s judgmental and has allowed this trait to create a rift between himself and his daughter’s husband.
– He refuses to accept that he is limited by his age and the decline of his physical strength.
– He is moody and not very good at concealing his temper from those he cares about.
You are an evil woman, which is why I love you.
Hmmm. Character flaws.
Thorn St. Croix, stone mage
– Her gift makes her open to the minds of all other mages, and therefore incapable of being near any of them without hating them all and probably going insane
– She is lazy and hasn’t bothered to attend to her mage education or her swordplay.
– self pitying, self desctructive, little twirp
– raised with humans she fears and, though she has won the love and friendship of several humans, she has hidden her true nature from them.
Man. She’s a mess at the start of the series.
Faith
Thanks, everyone– it’s neat to see the things you see as flaws in your characters.
Now, i wonder– did you purposely create those flaws, or did the characters themselves inform you of their weaknesses?
Oh, jeez. Well, Joanne Walker is terrified of commitment and responsibility and caring about people, and Margrit Knight thinks she can take on the world without ever asking for help, and Belinda Primrose…well. She’s a psychopath. If you want to call that a flaw.
Aspiring writer comment time…’cause this is a good test for me.
One of my leading men, Armand:
This man’s issues begin with his sister to whom things come easily (or so it seems). His father is often dismissive of Armand’s efforts. (i.e. Armand is a truly talented musician, but his father sees no use in such skills.) This begins a habit of internalizing the ridicule of others and making it his own.
As a young man, Armand develops a terrible, jealousy-inducing crush on the man who was his childhood companion.
His peers find him strange, too thoughtful, and many of them suspect his attraction to men and mock him mercilessly, even though he has never been open about this particular aspect of his life. He’s not really very open about anything.
Helping him beyond all of this is going to be a wonderful process for me. (And the challenge here, is making him sympathetic, rather than a complete drag to read.)
Thanks for this site! It never fails to give me good things to think about.
I’ve had a lot of fun with the characters in my new work, balancing the three main guys so that they have different flaws.
The girl is concerned with virtue, but causes problems =. She does not want her companions to act immorally, even when the earth is at stake. (And she has one great, great weakness — men — which is going to get her into loads of trouble.
The men are less concerned with pure morality, but they have weaknesses of their own. One is power /knowledge hungry, the other wants to experiment on his own brain. (Both of which will get the two of them into bags of trouble.)
Hopefully, the three of them will both balance each other nicely and get into enormous scrapes.
Araceli D’Ovne -
She is a girl who was savagely attacked at a very young age. This makes her very distrustful of strangers, likes being alone, emotionally dependant on those that she does trust, and prone to flights of insanity. Oh, did I mention she must go to the most powerful people in the land to convince them that she heard the voice of God?