Identifying and demonstrating your character’s key flaw is an essential part of a good story. But what is a character flaw? Where does it come from?
A Protagonist’s Flaws Tie the Story Together
In the last exercise we identified six key steps to a functional, commercial story:
Introduce the character in their normal life, where they are unhappy due to a personal flaw.
- A problem arrives that disturbs their normal life.
- They attempt to solve it the problem but fail because of their flaw.
- Things are made worse by their failed attempt.
- In their darkest hour they overcome their flaw.
- The problem resolved, they return to their new life a happier person
As you can see, the character’s flaw is the thread that ties this altogether. But a flaw doesn’t work if it’s abstract: “Fred is greedy”, “Sam is afraid of commitment.” To create an effective flaw, it has to come from some event in the character’s life.
Give your Character a Wound
Romance author Nancy Harrington calls this the character’s “wound” and suggests that this comes from some event in your protagonist’s childhood. A childhood event is effective because our youth is so formative of our personality, and equally because it is easier to empathise with a child (we’ll talk about the importance of creating empathy later.)
Whenever you place this event, something important must have happened to your protagonist that distorted their world view. A character flaw is an (incorrect) idea about how the world works, which causes them to make decisions prevent them from being happy. The more compelling the wounding incident, the more believable your character flaw will be, and thus the more believable your story.
Notice that this approach to character flaws also places agency firmly in the hands of your protagonist: it is their way of responding to the world that is the central problem of the story. This is as it should be. Your lead character isn’t the protagonist if the story isn’t driven by their problems.
In this exercise you will write an opening scene using a maximum of 200 words (you may wish to use your story from exercise one).
- Introduce your character in their normal life.
- Show them in the midst of handling a problem – it’s always best to start in the middle of the action.
- Illustrate their character flaw in the way they handle the problem.
- Explain the incident that wounded them and how this caused the character flaw.
- Show them resolving the problem, but that this doesn’t make them happy.
- Lead into the next problem.
We are still writing ugly, so don’t worry about quality of prose or being too declarative. Just make sure you hit all six steps in as clear a fashion as possible, without going over 200 words. Good luck!
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