Do Your Characters Need a Flaw? Try the opposite of their strength.
Nature abhors perfection– and so does the novel.
Fiction, like nature, is all about change. So in a novel, heroism requires more than being perfectly heroic, even more than committing heroic acts. It also requires the ability to change under pressure, to grow into someone better even if it hurts.
I was asked, “I know I can’t have perfect characters. So how do I give my character a flaw?”
I’d suggest starting with the character strength and reverse-engineer. That way the “flaw” is important to this person and can’t be easily overcome. If, for example, her great strength is “determination,” she won’t want to give that up. She won’t want to suddenly become wishy-washy!
But “determination,” like all strengths, comes with problems. If you’re determined, you probably are also stubborn. You might bull-doze people who aren’t as strong-minded as you are. You might unwittingly alienate friends. You might stick with a course even when it’s getting clear it’s not likely to work. You might get chosen for tasks you’re not good at, simply because you’re always determined to do a good job. So you might constantly be getting in over your head, but be unwilling to admit failure.
Making the flaw the obverse of the strength is what Aristotle meant: “That which makes him great brings him down.”
Just as medicine become poison in a different dose, so do strengths become flaws. It’s pretty elegant, and I think it’s true to our human nature. We get in more trouble with our strengths than our weaknesses!
I have an article about this on my website. It’s called “The Heroic Flaw.”
Quick Journey to Plot Exercise: Your Turn!
My books are character-driven, so I might say, "Oh, I never plot." But in fact, I've learned to do basic plotting by using a character journey as the big structural apparatus really helps. That is, very basically, what is my character's journey through the story? Like:
Independence to affiliation
or
Distrust to trust
or
Innocence to corruption
or
Shame to self-acceptance
or where the character starts emotionally/psychologically and where she/he ends up. Let’s try “independence to affiliation.” Chart the main steps involved:
Act 1. Beginning: She is devoted to her independence in the first act, and I show that (how will the reader know this). She should probably be given the choice to accept help but refuse it.
End of act 1 (maybe around ch. 2): Something (what) happens that makes her independence more of a problem than a solution. (What happens and how does she react)
Act 2: Things heat up on the external plane and make her independence or self-reliance a REAL problem, and she gradually has to change in response to 3-4 events in the external plot. Some group or person should probably be giving her help, or trying to, or trying to get her to affiliate.
End of Act 2: In the crisis/dark moment, her need to be independent really complicates the external conflict, and she's in huge trouble (or she's about to lose her goal or lose something essential). In the dark moment, she has to choose to change and ask for help or something that compromises her independence but allows her to receive help from being affiliated with someone or some group.
Act 3: In the climactic scene, where the external plot resolves, her newfound willingness to accept help allows her to conquer whatever the main conflict in the outer plot is.
End of Act 3: Because she has now chosen to affiliate, she is more happy and safe, but also might keep her independence a bit by becoming not just a follower but a leader.
That is, you're going to have certain things happen in the external plot. If you have a sense of what the main character needs to learn and accomplish-- the journey's start and destination-- you can make each of those plot events push the character down that journey road.
As I start a story, I try to have a really good sense of where my character starts out, and how she'll react to each plot event given that starting point, and usually, of course, the basic endpoint is fairly obvious once I know how she's limited or damaged at the start.
I like to analyze plots, but my own... I'll get bored if I outline too deeply ahead of time. What I'd love to be wild and yet disciplined enough to do is to write wildly and freely in the first draft, and then use journey, outlining, and structure to revise it in a second draft.
Alicia
The End... of the Beginning
The End of the Beginning
Most of us storywriters are obsessed with the openings to stories—that is, how to effectively start the plot and introduce the characters. But the opening has to end for the plot to really get underway. So as you're revising your opening, look at the last few paragraphs of the first chapter or wherever your "opening" ends. Does the end of the open “open up” to the complications of the story?
The End of the Beginning
I’d like to blog about openings to stories—that is, how to effectively start your story. It’s a subject big enough, I could write a book about it, and probably will! (Here are some posts on my own blog that discuss openings.) So to keep this relatively short, I want to focus on the all-important last paragraph.
The beginning of a story has a lot to do, and it might be most helpful to write your opening, write the rest of your story, then come back and revise the opening so it is more effective in setting up the plot questions and themes. I was helping a friend with a story recently, and we discussed the “end of the beginning”. This book is about a girl raised in Europe who was forced by her parents to study piano for years. She is disillusioned by music and eager to get far away from her parents, so chooses a college in the US that has lost its music program. That’s the opening, setting up her college story.
I suggested that the author think about what is going to happen later in the book. The college is going to resuscitate the music program and recruit the protagonist to be the first major, and in the end of the book she’s going to found her own punk band, showing that she has chosen her own way (not the parents or school). Boy! This is good, because it forces her to change, to learn to value her own talent, to choose rather than just react.
The end of the opening, however, could better set up the “praxis” of her journey, by posing a bit of a conflict or question. In a way, the last paragraph in the opening could serve as a “hinge” to the rest of the story, actually helping to open up to the rising conflict and rising action of the middle, and hinting at the theme that will be resolved in the ending.
His first chapter has her choosing a college, deliberately selecting the one that has lost its music program. I suggested a final paragraph that would emphasize what the author wants readers to think about. But to achieve that, he must identify what that is! Does he want the readers to think about her disorientation at being in the US after Europe, a fish out of water? Or her sense of her musical talent being trapped by the expectations of her parents even as she arrives in this new place?
He agreed with the latter, that her journey should start with her resistance to those expectations about music, and so he wanted to draw the reader’s attention to this. So he ended the first chapter this way, “My first class was History of Culture, in the Humanities Quad. Shoved into a corner of the lecture hall was a grand piano, swaddled in a gray quilted cover. I hurried past and took a seat in the center, directly in front of the professor.”
This image of the swaddled piano sets up the conflict between her desire to be “merely a student” and her musical talent, and provides a concrete action (hurrying past the piano) to symbolize the beginning of her journey from resistance to self-acceptance. If the author wanted to emphasize her “fish out of water” aspect, how could that be achieved with the same situation (entering her first class lecture hall)? Maybe she could look around and realize that everyone else in the class is dressed down while she dressed up? Or that she has the wrong textbook?
Another way to use that final paragraph in the first chapter is to set up a motif (a recurring thematic image or concept) which the rest of the story will develop. For example, in my Regency novel Poetic Justice, the first chapter pits the hero John against an enemy, who tries to trick him by offering an alliance and then trying to kill him. I was worried that the adventure of this opening would conflict with the quieter aspects of the rest of the story. But then I realized that no matter what the situation, John was always being “tested”, especially by the class system that scorns him as a tradesman.
By the time his shipmates arrived panting, daggers drawn, the light was gone entirely and the dock was slippery with blood. Two of the bandits had fled, and the third lay unconscious on the dock. John loosed his death grip on the saddlebag, let his first mate take it, let his steward peel his fingers from around the knife and put it away. He nudged the bandit with his foot. “Tell your employer,” he said, then paused to drag in a breath, “that I passed that test too.”
Thus, in the final paragraph of the first chapter, I emphasized this motif of “the test” to connect this scene with the rest of the story, which develops and finally resolves the recurrent pattern by having him pass the ultimate test by winning the heroine’s heart.
Look at your own first chapter and think of how you might use that last paragraph to set up the rest of the book, by establishing the context or conflict, by posing a question the rest of the story will answer, or by connecting the first scene with the rest of the story using a theme or motif. Any examples from your work?
