Character Flaws (Of Mine)

I’ll warn you now, this week’s thoughts are frazzled.

You see, I’m working on a novel, and as this is my debut long-form writing project, I’ve been giving myself a lot of grace. Namely, in writing a main character who is basically a version of me. We’ll work towards more of a stretching personality switch in the future, but I’m learning that writing what you know is actually quite challenging enough for now.

Recently, I decided to treat myself to a MasterClass subscription to further my education. Now, I was already a good way through penning Mila into existence when I began to study Margaret Atwood’s course on creative writing. The literary crone (whose pen has brought her to incredulous levels of success) quickly forced me to confront a deep error I’d been making in developing this my protagonist. I realized, now with educated disgust, that I had been creating her to be everything perfect that I myself longed to be. She was me, as I hoped others would see me, all beauty and brains and kindness, a secretly super cool hot-girl whose quiet nature causes people to wrongfully underestimate her constantly. She was your perfect friend, perfect sister, perfect student, and perfect girlfriend, and naturally the victim of everything wrong that had ever happened to her. She was a very bad, tired, perfect archetype. 

That is, until I heard Professor Atwood share her thoughts on perfect characters. And while the realization that Mila needed flaws led me down a regretfully rather untraveled path,  scanning and probing my own, what really gripped me was the realization that though we shy away from shining the spotlight on them, our faults are actually what make each of us very interesting people.

But that’s not all there is to the equation, of course, because characters don’t exist in an empty void. No, they exist within a story. A story requires movement from one point to another, which requires some element of time, and as per the definition of anything living, naturally, time begets growth. So let’s add the flaws of the character to the opportunity for growth the story affords them, and this is where it gets good. A character too stagnantly flawed is almost as uninteresting as one too perfectly pristine…but someone who follows falling with floundering and failing with flailing is someone we want to watch. Why? Because they’re using their timeline to try, to reach out for growth. 

I suspect this is simply one of many learning moments I’ll muddle through in this journey of writing my first novel. Creating an environment in which Mila could struggle would be key to the storyline, and for this she would need appropriate obstacles from within herself. From this point on, I can promise that my characters will have flaws, both obvious and discreet. They will hurt people (even Mila!), and there will be apologies given and apologies owed. Certainly, there will be growth to be grown.

The lessons between the pages of my novel are already bleeding into my life, and I am grateful to Ms. Atwood for leading this horse to water. Though the story has a long way to go, I look forward to continuing to share pieces of the progress with you here, so we can grow together.