The Art of Creating Flawed Characters
Flawed protagonists and antagonists create more compelling stories
Occasionally, I run across negative reviews of my published stories. Sometimes, a particular reader will give a one-star rating or two-star rating to one of my stories for reasons that leave me scratching my head.
A handful of readers have criticized my stories for having characters who are too angry, immature, and/or stupid and make dumb mistakes. Such criticisms are baffling. The real world is filled with angry, immature, and stupid people who make terrible decisions. Centering stories around protagonists with obvious flaws makes a story feel more realistic and more relatable to the average reader than populating a fictional world with a cast of characters who are practically perfect in every way.
A blueprint for better characters
Stories are only as compelling as the characters who drive the action. If you settle for a stock one-note character, you end up with a story lacking any true substance.
Characters spring to life on a page when an author infuses them with a complete personality. Scenes involving a character should act as a snapshot capturing their thoughts and their emotions even if they are not the POV (point-of-view) character. A reader should get a feel for anything from their interests to their worldview that’s relevant to moving the story forward.
I always make a point of sketching out biographies of my main characters and key secondary characters who appear in a novel. These biographies detail the character’s physical appearance, their interests, their personality traits, and their life history. Delving into a character in this fashion opens the door for a richer story. I can draw on a character’s personality and their past experiences to inform their thoughts and actions within a story.
Seeing the world through a character’s eyes
I’ll use criticisms I’ve received from a few critics of Alien People to illustrate my wider points concerning characterization.
One criticism of my opening novel in the Alien People Chronicles focuses on how the aliens act like inept, amateur explorers. These critics complain that Xttra and his crew are too naïve about Earth, take ineffective steps to make first contact with Earthian leaders, make dumb rash decisions rather than waiting to gather more information, and bicker with one another too much. The same critics are also quick to pile on the Earthians for collectively being angry, dumb, reactionary, and violent.
In their rush to express their disdain for my story, these critics missed the theme of the novel. Alien People shows how suspicion and fear can swallow up hope and optimism and eventually lead good people down a destructive path. Characters on both sides let their emotions cloud their judgement and it naturally leads to a series of poor decisions. These critics also failed to see my story through the eyes of the characters themselves.
I readily admit both the Lathoan explorers and the Earthian leaders in Alien People make avoidable stupid mistakes. That’s the whole point. Their personality traits lead those characters down specific destructive paths. Calandra, for example, is hopeful and optimistic to the point of being naïve. This outlook becomes problematic because she’s also persistent about getting her way at all costs. Calandra ignores obvious warning signs with the Earthians until it’s too late because of a desperate desire to prove they are peaceful probe builders like she first assumed. Xttra is naturally confident, fearless, and loyal. But those traits inevitably blind his actions and put his crew at risk. Xttra lets his ego get in the way while leading the expedition to Earth. He bristles at any challenges to his leadership, which negatively impacts his decision making. His loyalty to Calandra and love for her also leads Xttra to ignore warning signs with the Earthians and side with her even when she’s wrong. Understanding the personalities of the two co-protagonists goes a long way to understanding why the Lathoans are unprepared, impulsive, and reckless during their expedition to Earth.
You can only understand why a story unfolds the way it does after you examine the story through the eyes of the characters. Their personalities drive their actions — good and bad alike.
If a character is impulsive and stubborn, for example, they are more likely to leap without looking and make decisions that are stupid from a reader’s perspective. But isn’t that principle true to real life? How many of us willingly make a rash emotional decision and it comes back to bite us later?
Point-of-view influences a story
One common denominator among the critical reviews I referenced earlier is a misunderstanding of how point-of-view works within a story. The critics are quick to dismiss characters making dumb decisions or exhibiting disagreeable personality traits as poor characterization.
This is misguided thinking. Flawed characters who make equally flawed decisions does not equal poor characterization.
Characters within a story operate on incomplete information. They aren’t going to see the whole picture in the same way a reader does and this limited knowledge influences their actions and behavior. Again, this is the same as real life. How many of us rush into making poor decisions based on incomplete information? How often do those decisions end up affecting us or others in a negative fashion? When characters always make the right decisions and end up being endlessly smart and clever, it makes for a boring, unrealistic story. Why? Because it isn’t reflective of the real world.
No matter what genre you write in as a fiction author, your story needs to be relatable to the average reader. How you build characters and how you portray them on the page is crucial to achieving this goal. A flawed protagonist feels much more real and relatable than a character who is already a perfect, polished stone from the moment they are introduced.
Writing flawed characters is extremely satisfying. An antagonist in my book The Mechanical Crown was convinced she was the hero, despite doing awful things and essentially .working for the villain. Readers really latched onto her: a case of loving to hate her, but also relishing in the dramatic irony of a character who is not self-aware and cannot see their own mistakes.
In my latest book, which I'm serialising on Substack, all the characters are flawed in some capacity. They all have contradictions to a greater or lesser extent. Many of them are quite unpleasant, while also doing 'good' things.
It' not unusual to see people disliking a story because there are no 'likeable' characters, though. Not just some of your work, John - films, books, comics, anything really can have a problem with some audiences if there are no clear heroic characters. I don't think this is necessarily due to a 'misunderstanding' on the readers' part; it just suggests to me that they're not the right audience.
I think these characters sound really interesting! I like when characters and stories reflect human nature as it really exists, not as it theoretically should exist in some perfect world. A lot of readers are probably given false expectations by lazy, made-for-tv style writing, but after a while, all those characters blend into one another. Perfection would make everything identical. Our unique combination of flaws are what make us individuals, and make us interesting :-)