Have you heard the old saying, “I love him/her, flaws and all”? We all have flawed people in our lives that we love, right? Because we all have flaws. In order to write good stories, we need to make sure that our characters have flaws too.
Do my characters have flaws?
I had to stop and really think about that. When I made my character sketches, I don’t remember thinking about what their flaws were. Now I have to go back and do that because none of us want to read about perfect people.
In my Hood River Valley Mystery/Thriller series, Detective Liz Ellisen is the main character. She is strong, courageous, smart, kind, friendly, did I mention smart? When I try and come up with flaws for her, the only thing I can think of off the top of my head is that she jumps into dangerous situations without thinking about the consequences. That makes her a good cop, but is it enough of a flaw to keep the reader reading? She’s also stubborn and won’t give up on an investigation until she solves the crime.
Spoiler alert here. If you don’t want to know, don’t read this paragraph! Liz has been through a lot. In the first book in the series, My Sister’s Keeper, her father and sister were both murdered, and she found out her husband was cheating on her with her best friend. Liz is strong. She mourned her family members, grieved for her marriage and friendship and moved on. There is a character in the series that Liz really, really doesn’t like. She often judges this character’s actions before she knows what’s going on. Liz is a great friend and she defends her friendships. She doesn’t, however, defend fools and there are a couple people in her life that fall into that category.
I recently read Mad Mabel. What a great bunch of characters. They were all flawed, even the 7-year-old girl. If you haven’t read it, it’s a great induction into flawed characters. But we can’t all write Mad Mabel. Someone has already written it, but we can learn from it and other stories with great characters.
I love writing about flawed characters. In my first book, The Truth Will Set You Free, a young woman is looking for her birth family. She traces her birth mother to a small town and a community that will do anything to protect their secrets and lies. This story has a dual timeline. It’s told through the daughter’s point of view, present day, and the mother’s point of view, thirty years earlier.
As much as I loved the main character, I loved writing about her mother even more. She was flawed, but she was a product of her upbringing and the way the town had treated her when she was a teenager.
In My Sister’s Keeper, I loved writing about cult leader, Jeremiah Swanson because he was bigger than life and extremely flawed.
And so it goes. Flawed characters are fun to write about and fun to read.
Did you watch the movie, The Blind Side? I loved Sandra Bullock’s character. She took in a young African American boy who didn’t have a home and gave him one. She did everything she could for that boy. And he came to love her, even calling her Mama. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend watching it if for nothing else, watch it for the character development.
One of my favorite books on building characters is Fiction is Folks by Robert Newton Peck. This book has been around for a while, but it’s great for understanding how to write compelling characters.
We’ve all read books where the characters are so well drawn that we feel we know them. We’ve also all read books, at least I have, where I get to the end of the story and realize it has a great story line, but the characters are interchangeable. This is especially true for crime fiction. Sometimes the author concentrates so hard on the plot that they forget to build strong characters. And you’re left feeling flat because the story didn’t touch your emotions.
The only way to write great stories is to write great characters. It doesn’t matter what genre you write, breath life into your characters. Your readers will thank you for it. They will read your book and come back for more.
Ladies of Mystery 