by Tram Hillyard

Regardless of how sensational the events in a story are, there have to be interesting characters involved in those events - characters are what keep a reader glued to the page. One way to make interesting characters is to make them more realistic, to create a sense that these could be people the reader might know and can relate to.

A very quick way to make your characters ‘real’ is to give them flaws. Great big flaws, flaws that are dangerous, flaws that are a drag to everyone in the story. Characters who have flaws are realistic because real people have flaws in their personalities. Everyone you know, every stranger you see when you walk down the street, everyone, has a great big tragic flaw. They don’t want you to see it, they will do their best to hide it, and most of the time the only people who will know are their closest loved ones – even then it may never be defined or discussed. But the flaws are there. Likewise, fictional characters that appeal all have some kind of tragic flaw, and how they deal with that flaw and how they hide or reveal it to other characters makes for dramatic situations and dialog.

You can also use character flaws to emphasize the differences between a hero and a villain. The difference in fiction between a good guy and a bad guy is that the bad guys flaws are predatory, they are those traits in the villain that are out to get people. The good guy’s flaws may hurt people, but only by accident. A hero or a villain may be proud, hasty, arrogant, afraid, or even brutal, but they will manifest themselves differently in the story. This is a good way to build to a conclusion of a story, as the flaws of both the protagonist and the villain become apparent first to the reader and then to the characters themselves.

September 13, 2010 4:40 pm

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