LOVE THOSE FLAWS

When I was young I was shy, I worried about my flaws. My knees were too knobby, my nose too big, my chest too flat. In addition, I couldn't swim.

All bad.

Little did I know that all humans are flawed, and when it comes to creating a character, flaws are good. Insecurities are good. Fears are good.

A story is CONFLICT. It's about a broken character trying to reach a worthy goal or solve a critical problem. As writers of story, we must make an emotional connection with the reader by creating characters as flawed as we are so that our story heroes are broken in the beginning and become whole at the end of their arduous journey.

Giving characters flaws helps create conflict.

In my novel, BELLY UP, I created a character who couldn't swim, put her on a sinking boat, and tossed her into the water in the middle of the ocean. As authors, we can kill off people, cause accidents, and blow up dreams. We break our characters in the beginning, prop them up to endure hardships as they battle internal and external obstacles. And that's how they discover UNIVERSAL TRUTHS about themselves and the world and become whole.

That's CHARACTER ARC.

In CHANGED IN THE NIGHT, I created a guilt-ridden teen with mental problems and forced her to duel with her most evil self during her quest to become WHOLE  Her obstacles include a dead brother only visible, alien abduction, parallel realities, extraterrestrial intervention and psychological issues.

We are human so we are flawed. Therefore, our characters must also be flawed.

The NEED in our character comes from these flaw or weaknesses. A flaw might be a psychological weakness like being a coward or too full of pride or a flaw can be a physical weakness like being unable to swim.

One interesting way to create a character weakness is to start with something that seems to be a good trait, like being generous. What if a character is generous to an extreme so that she's giving away the family fortune, money put away for her own college education? Eventually, this generosity, once praised, is a curse after her father loses his job and her mother needs expensive medical treatment.

Anything good to the extreme becomes bad; for example, someone who loves too much and becomes obsessive and possessive. Interesting concept.

Give your hero character flaws revealed through actions. Make sure one is a moral weakness so that others in the story might be harmed by it, and give the hero's opponents in the story weaknesses, too. When a character demonstrates courage in spite of everything and becomes whole in the end, we rejoice because it means we, too, can overcome our own weaknesses.