Writing Characters That Mess Everything Up

You’ve created the “perfect” character — layered, unique, an average guy with a hero’s capability or a hero with a quality that brings him down to earth.  Your story has moved along perfectly, your pace is fabulous, your character is primo.

But, wait.

Is he too perfect? Is he so perfect that he’s incapable of making a mistake??  HAS he made a single error in judgment, a single mistake throughout your story that relates to his deepest desires and fears? If not, then he’s not perfect at all.  In fact, that would make him a character in quick need of a human-ectomy.  He needs surgery to make him human.  Relatable.

When we’re writing our stories and making our characters, it’s easy to forget to make them flawed.  And I don’t mean flaws such as “she can’t cook worth a damn.” (Which is probably more of a quirk.) I mean flaws that result in bad choices, in decisions with consequences and things for him or her to regret later in life.

Because, that’s not only human, it’s a requirement for growing, for learning.  You don’t learn a thing by being perfect or thinking you never make a mistake.  Your characters won’t either.

Three Dimensions. Not Two. Not One.

What creates a three dimensional person? I want you to consider the people you know.  Certainly, there is someone in your life who always smiles, never has a bad word to say about anyone, doesn’t  swear, doesn’t drink, doesn’t seem to have a vice of any sort, in fact.  On that surface description, how intersting is that person?  That surface impression shows nothing but a very one dimensional person.  No side, no angles, no sharp and pointy corners that might sting.  She seems like the epitome of grace and goodness.

But with any character trait, there is always a flipside.  It’s the principle of ying and yang, but it’s also very important to building “real” characters.   If someone has an unfailingly good quality — like our Lady One Dimensional above, who is unfailingly kind and good, there is usually a negative that comes from that as well.  Perhaps with Lady OD, she’s constantly good and kind because she’s terrified of someone not liking her.  She never says a bad word, she never does the wrong thing, because she feels she can’t.  Which means that underneath all that kindness is someone who isn’t very honest.  She’s made a career of lying, of not being her genuine self.

If we were making this character real, we would take that good trait, find the flaw inherent with it and flip it upside down. Use it.  So if Lady OD is unfailingly good, she will make mistakes based around that.  What if her inability to be honest about her feelings, her inability to say what she truly feels about a person caused someone else pain?  If she could warn a friend about someone she knew in her heart was bad, but didn’t.  When she should have put her friend’s needs first, she put her own ahead. It would be a mistake, born of her constant struggle of being good versus being true.

Flawed characters have good and bad traits.  Because of that, they make mistakes.  They choose wrong paths.

Desires and Fears

Often times, a person’s desires and fears are in direct conflict of each other.  A person’s greatest desire will probably also mirror their greatest fear.  They are closely intertwined.

For example, let’s take Aurora.  She’s a woman who has had her trust broken by almost every man she’s ever met, starting with her father. (It really does always come back to childhood.)  Over time, she’s learned that she can only depend on herself…and most often, people start depending on her as well.

What would you suppose her greatest desire would be? To find someone she can trust.  But you can always dig deeper than that.  What does trust mean, truly? It means safety, it means security.  It means depending on someone and letting go of the control.  So what this woman wants most in life is to have someone she can depend on, someone she can at times the burden of feeling safe and secure with.  Someone, who when she is so tired and unable to be strong for herself, she can know that this person will hold her up.

But you can bet that because of her own experiences and her need to protect herself, her greatest fear is also depending on someone.  Letting go of the control she’s had to build over the years, after each time she was let down, and finally learning how to depend only on herself.  This woman will naturally be drawn to the man who meets her desire and challenges her fear.  At that point, she becomes the person responsible for taking the step to let go, to give over that part of herself so she will actually depend on someone else.

Moments Make Up The Person

When establishing those desires/fear or the ying/yang of a person’s qualities, you also need to look to specific moments in their past.  Consider your own history.  There are likely exact moments in time that you recall with a crystal clarity. You remember specific details… and in that moment, that exact moment, something in your life changed.  Something in YOU changed. It could be a small thing or it could be the moment your world tilted on its side, when something you believe in wholeheartedly ceased to exist.  Those moments make up your desires and fears…and they will for your characters, too.   Be sure you know what a few of them are.

If we go back to Aurora, saying that she’s had her trust broken by men is a general statement.  But you can bet, if Aurora were a real person, there would be exact moments in her past that she recalls with a painful clarity.  Moments when the pain in her heart stabbed, when she looked at the person she wanted to believe in, only to realize he wasn’t who she thought.  The exact second she learned that the man she loved had cheated on her.  Or the moment when another man she cared about and thought she could love turned around and walked away from her.

Exact moments with a visceral clarity.  Visit them however you have to — I like to journal in my character’s voice, first person– but it’s up to you. Just be sure you take that trip into the past.

Now, Take Away As Much As You Can.

Take the list of things your character wants and fears most, then figure out how to take that list and apply it to your story.  What can you give them? What can you take away? What can you force them to face?  The more times you directly hit upon that list of desires and fears, the higher the stakes will raise.

Back to Aurora… She has finally met the man of her dreams… the one man she has ever been to trust, he’s proven himself and gotten past her walls of fear.  With him, she’s able to let go with, to relax that constant control and let him in.   With him, she’s built a family on a very solid structure.

To make this story come to life, we have to smack Aurora in the face with her desires and fears again.  Threaten the relationship.  Threaten the safety and security she’s found.  If you were her, and someone threatened to take that man away, what would you do?  What would SHE do?  You’d want to think she’d fight for him, but would that really be her first reaction?  Doubtful.  Because even though she’s found what she’s wanted, she’s lived a life with this yin/yang of desire/fear.

So we need to revisit Aurora’s fears and desires, and reactions to both, to see how she responds.  She’ll make mistakes at first, with that initial primal reaction.  Instead of trusting this man, perhaps she would fall back into old patterns and close up those walls and make herself into a fortress of impenetrable strength again.  She would distance herself, withdraw — perhaps hurting her husband in the face of her difficulty to trust.   And then, when she realizes all that is at stake, she’ll rectify that mistake. She must fight for him, for herself, for the life she’s worked so hard to find.  She must not only conquer her mistakes, but her fears, as well.

Don’t be afraid to raise the stakes.  Let your characters make mistakes, ones that feed directly from their own desires and fears.  The fear will almost always rise to the top first.    And then the hero comes out and find a way to conquer the fear, perhaps even vanquish it for good.

This is human.  This is relatable.  This is writing characters who mess everything up.

Next Monday: I’ll talk about the difference between flaws that are fixable, flaws that aren’t and quirks… and how to know which ones you’ve given your characters.

Special Guests Coming Up This Month

We have some terrific guests coming this month, so be sure to come back!

Friday, Jan 22: Larry Brooks, bestselling author and founder of Storyfix.com, will be here to discuss the seven key values to maintain as you write your romance.

Thursday, Jan 28:  The hunky and incredibly nice cover model, Jimmy Thomas, joins us to tell us about how he got started, what he enjoys most and what’s ahead.

Friday, Jan 29th: Author team KM Daughters visits us and shares some of their secrets and dishes about their latest romantic suspense, CAPTURING KARMA.