Fatal Flaws and Redeeming Revenues

"You can make anything by writing," -C.S. Lewis

First of all, ya'll should follow me on Instagram - @_wordshaker_

Anyways, I found this post on the infamous Tumblr that perfectly represents what us writers think when we say our characters are perfect.  It is as follows:

What I mean when I call a character perfect is "wow look at how flawed you are, how broken and three dimensional and well written. Look at how much of a disaster you are.  Look at how you are constantly torn between right and wrong, and you make so many mistakes along the way.  Wow, look at how human you are."  So basically, when I say they are perfect, what I mean is thank God they aren't. 

Sometimes, Tumblr just hits the nail on the head.  This leads in to what I want to talk about today, which is how every good character needs a fatal flaw and a redeeming revenue, hence the title. 

I am going to be using my wonderful characters from my WIP for examples, along with some other famous characters I am familiar with. 

But to start off, what makes or breaks a character is an imbalance of good and bad. For the protagonist (hero) the scale should, generally, be more towards the good side.  For an antagonist, vice versa.  But when things get interesting is when they are all shades of gray. The problem I have with older stories, and fantasy like stories, is how some of the characters tend to have an imbalance in their character traits, which I find unrealistic.  

For example, Terra. She's intelligent and resourceful, determined and emotionally vulnerable.  However, she's selfish.  She's passive aggressive. She's standoffish. Terra has enough good to make her a heroine, but enough bad to make her human. 

And take Jack Shephard from Lost.  Many fans of Lost dislike him because of his blaring negative traits, like being controlling and obsessive.  But, in defense of one of my favorite characters, Jack is also self-sacrificial, a natural leader, and a generally caring and fighting-for-the-greater-good kind of guy. Jack has the redeeming characters that make you like him, that make you want him to win, make you cheer for him and want things to all work out in the end.  But then he has his flaws, which make for more bumps in the road to getting there. Which is accurate to life, which I quite frankly love. 

And what I'm trying to say by all of this is that your characters need a good balance of good and bad  - and this will all depend on the characters themselves - to make them three-dimensional, making them more relatable, and in turn,  creating memorable characters for ages to come. 

~The WordShaker