Episode 28: How Do I Write Realistically Flawed Characters?

In this week’s episode, Crys and JP talk about what flaws are, how to use flaws in your writing, and problematic representation of flaws in writing and media.

Show Notes:

Books:

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer: https://amzn.to/2MHYSmT

Chime by Franny Billingsley: https://amzn.to/36wgJnR

The Way of Kings: The Stormlight Archive, Book 1 by Brandon Sanderson: https://amzn.to/2MrvcKT

TV and Movies:

Twilight Series

Lovecraft Country

Jessica Jones

Transcript:

Crys: Hello, friends. This is episode number 28 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is January 28th as we are recording this. I’m Crys Cain with my cohost, JP Rindfleisch. How’s writing going, JP?

JP: Oh, let’s see. Actually this past week, it has been going relatively well. I’ve been working on figuring out how to do time blocking. Can’t say that I’m there yet, but just working on it has been making an improvement, which is nice. This weekend though, I totally fell in the pit of burnout, and I just vegged out on my couch. But ever since Monday, I’ve just been keeping that good, steady pace.

Crys: By the time this episode airs, I will no longer be in deadline hell. And this is something that I have brought upon myself because it could have been writing in small increments, and just being like, I know everything else going on is really crazy, but if I just write a little bit every day, then I’ll be closer. And I didn’t. And then everybody got sick, and I lost days of writing. And now, even with decreasing the expected count of this book, I still have 12,000 words to write before end of day tomorrow. Yay.

JP: But on a side note, you did write 4,000 words today already, so…

Crys: It’s seven o’clock in the morning, I have been up since midnight. At three o’clock in the morning I gave up on going back to sleep and I started writing. And the reason I do not have more than 4,000 words is because I have a huge problem with productive procrastination, which is fine in a normal day where you can flip between different things and still get all the things done that you need to that week. It is not so great when you have to write 12,000 more words in two days.

JP: I believe in you.

Crys: But I have a quarterly plan started now. And I also know exactly the steps that I need to go through to build my camper van. These are not things I needed to figure out this week.

JP: You can do it. I believe in you.

Crys: I’m not sure why I woke up at midnight, but I do know that I was having a very intense dream of living in a camper van and building a camper van, so my obsessions infiltrate every part of my life. And I’m not sure if the camper van dreaming woke me up or if something woke me up and I just happened to be dreaming that.

JP: Yeah, maybe put those aside for the next 48 hours. You got this.

Crys: A note for our listeners: my internet was terrible this day, so you are going to hear us switch back and forth in audio quality a couple of times going forward. I’m sorry.  Hopefully this doesn’t interrupt your comprehension or enjoyment of the content. 

JP:  This week I want to talk about how do we write realistically flawed characters?

Crys: Did you ever remember what anger prompted this question for you?

JP: Okay. So I may or may not have had an original title for this, which was that the flawed hero archetype is bullshit.

And I think the reason behind it was… I never found out what the specific one was, but the main thing that I noticed a lot in some TV and some books, especially ones that are written like 10 years ago or so, is that the main character has some type of flaw that they more or less overcome. And sometimes those flaws are things that are not things that people overcome, but they’re things that people deal with, learn how to cope with them. A lot of it was mental health, or else it was like an addiction or something like that.

And so I really just wanted to talk about this and talk about differences that we can have in our characters with flaws and how to approach those flaws.

Crys: So what’s an example of a flaw that you see a lot that makes you just go shaky hands crazy?

JP: I would say a ton. So just a quick definition of flaw just to start off would be that flaws are basically biases, limitations, imperfections, problems, disorders, vices, phobias, prejudices, or deficiencies within a character. And more or less, they get categorized into three groups.

You have your minor flaws, your major flaws, and your tragic flaws. Minor would be those imperfections that distinguished characters. So those could be things like scars or an accent or a mannerism. Then we have those major ones. Those are hindrances that impair your character either physically, mentally, or morally. And then you have your tragic flaws, which are the fatal ones that lead to downfall or death of your character.

I guess the big ones that I have concern or issue with would be the ones that deal with mental health. Especially with the concept that a character is capable of just getting over their mental health. Especially in the world of depression, living with a partner who has it, I’ve been able to learn how that looks in the real world. And it is very different than how it gets portrayed in television and whatnot. It’s not something that people really heal from. It’s something that they cope with and they learn along the way. So I think that an approach that I would love to see more of is learning those coping mechanisms along the way, as opposed to just, I am now healed of my ailments.

Crys: Yeah, I agree. And I think a lot of writers, more often than not, I don’t think we even have representation for those types of quote unquote flaws. I can only think of two off the top of my head. And they were really good portrayals, which is why they stuck in my brain.

So we have kind of two problems, and the one we’re going to engage with most is the wrong way to, but the second problem is not putting these kinds of things into your book in the first place. Maybe that’s a whole other episode about how to include neurodivergent folks in this particular element.

Do you have any examples of flaws that were not explored in a realistic way that comes to the top of your mind?

JP: Yeah. I have a couple. I think one of the big ones that really sticks out in literature is the character Edward Cullen from the Twilight series.

Obviously that series did well. It sold a lot of books. It gained a lot of attention, but I think we can’t neglect the fact that Edward Cullen is so abusive. He basically claims Bella as property. And no one else calls him out for shit. And I think abusive behavior is a flaw, but I think that the degree that it went to in that book, it should have been addressed.

Crys: I’m silent because I’m thinking about this.

With that, do you think that Meyer knew she was creating a problematic character? Do you think she knew she was writing an abusive character?

JP: I’m going to default to no, I think it was just a love story between two teenagers and you had an immortal being that was being portrayed as a teenager. And I think that’s where the dichotomy comes from, is you’re writing a story where someone is a few decades older than the other character who clearly should have more experience, and they’re being portrayed severely abusive. And I don’t think it was intentional, but I think that’s something that when we’re writing, we should be cognizant of what we are writing, just to not represent abuse in that kind of light.

Crys: I have a problem with stories that involve immortals falling in love with teenagers. Just entirely.

JP: So, is there an abusive relationship you can think of in either television or books that potentially represent this in a quote unquote positive light? Obviously, abuse is not positive, but at least represents it correctly?

Crys: The show the pops to the top of my head, I think it’s called Legion. It’s this superhero-esque show. And there is this one character who is very clearly at some point in the show an abuser, and you don’t realize that necessarily until later on. I think that they do deal with the ramifications of that fairly clearly.

Maybe not clearly because dealing with the ramifications of abuse is never clear, but I do think that they point out that this is extremely problematic. One of my favorite things about writing outside of contemporary, real world, or historical world fiction, is that you can take these elements and make them bigger and sometimes more obvious.

For instance, if you have an abusive character, and this goes back to the DC show, Jessica Jones was another one where you had an abuser who had mental powers. So you take the real world ability of abusers to get inside their victim’s heads, purposefully or not, because not all abusers do this on purpose, they are reacting out of their own pain, but that doesn’t make them any less abusers. But you take the abuser’s ability to get in their victim’s head and fuck them up and expand it to a superpower. You make it bigger, you make it scarier, and you make it something that’s a little clearer and more able to deal with. But also in expanding that ability, for people who haven’t experienced that, you make it more real to them. Because when you are a victim of abuse, the power of that person is as big as a superpower, is as big as the villain. That’s one of the things I really like about science fiction and fantasy is just our ability to take real life things and blow them up and address them in really interesting ways.

JP: And I think while you were mentioning that, I was thinking, what kind of tools could an author like Stephanie Meyer have used when writing Twilight series to make sure that she was representing the character in the best way that she possibly could? I don’t know if she did this, and obviously I don’t know her methods, but I think if I were to approach this, I would have really used the emotion thesaurus because I feel like I could have either circumnavigated some of the problematic approaches, or I could have really pushed into it and known what I was writing at the time. That’s at least what I would have done had I been in that place.

Crys: My top recommendation would be everyone should go to therapy.

The more knowledge we have about ourselves, the better characters we can write, and therapy will also teach us a lot about other people. But I want to take it back a little bit because you defined flaws, and specifically the flaws that frustrate you and how they’re defined.

So I want to dance around the definition for a minute of flaws, and I’m trying to find the way that I want to phrase this. One, our characters should be flawed because every human is flawed.

We’re talking about flaws in a very generic sense here. In the list that you read, the major flaws indicate physically, mentally, and morally. And I think that’s a really important thing to zone in, that the physical and mental flaws, I think are the ones that we get frustrated when they get magicked away or overcome. While the moral flaws, I think are often the ones that we do want to see characters overcome.

What do you think about that?

JP: I totally agree. Especially honing in on moral flaws, those are things that people can either work with what their personality gives them and figure out how to manage the world through a different perspective. But when we start talking about these physical and mental quote unquote flaws, we often view it in the sense of a neurotypical, physically capable, a hundred percent capable person.

We presume our experiences are default, and that’s not the case. Especially if you take the deaf community, for example. Often those that are hearing capable presume that the deaf want to hear. They presume that they want implants, that they want to make it more or less easier for the hearing community to participate in their world, as opposed to the hearing community learning about the deaf community and participating.

And that’s just more or less a default assumption. Now there was a character on Zoe’s Extraordinary Playlist and then there’s a couple of characters that I’ve seen that really express this ideology of the fact that we impose these assumptions that we expect them to resolve, when realistically they don’t want them.

They want to be within their community and grow within their community and be that representative person, and then interact with the world through those lens. So I think when we talk about physical and mental flaws, we just need to take a step back from our own viewpoint and take into consideration what those that may have those quote unquote flaws view the world.

Crys: This builds a lot on what we talked about in our couple of episodes on gender. You mentioned the neurotypical viewpoint. The assumption that there is a standard or a normal experience is part of the problem here. The statistics say that probably one in eight people have ADHD.

ADHD is currently diagnosed as a maladaptive set of ways of interacting with the current world that we are in.

That current world I’m talking about is Western, I’m talking about, very high paced, city-based, but there’s a theory that the reason people who have what we label ADHD, they developed for a purpose and a reason. Often to be hyper-aware, hypervigilant… one of the problems. quote-unquote problems, flaws of ADHD is that lack of ability to focus in on one thing and stay with it, unless it’s something they hyper-focus on. And those are two skills that can be used in the right context.

So a tribe living on the Savannah or in the jungle would be well off having someone who was distracted by every little thing so that they could note early on when there’s something unusual, that might be a danger that would come in. Also the hyper-fixation that often comes with ADHD can get projects done very quickly if that brain focuses in on that. And you’ve done really good to try and avoid the rants. I’m going to try and keep this rant minimal, but I constantly want to challenge, we constantly want to challenge this idea that there is a normal or typical experience.

Particularly, I want to challenge that my experience, what I perceive, is not normal or typical. A lot of us, particularly people drawn to creative works, writing works, introspective works–a lot of us also feel like we’re the only one who’s ever dealt with the stuff that we’ve dealt with. So there’s this balance of “nobody ever has dealt with the things I’ve dealt with”– you’re one in 7 or 8 billion, highly unlikely–or everybody should live the way I have or has lived the way I have.

Neither of these are true. And we want to challenge ourselves. We want to challenge you to challenge your understanding of what is normal or your belief of what is normal.

JP: Yeah. And I think, just for the people who still listen to us after our crazy rants, we really like to hit these hard topics because of the fact that we want to write flawed characters, but we want to do it respectfully. And yes, that may come off as “oh, this is hard to do,” but I want to challenge everyone that’s listening to just encroach yourself, like just drown in the world around you, and take in different pieces of media and learn about different communities of people in different perspectives of life, because that’s how we grow as writers. And this is the stepping off point for our topic on flawed characters, just like it was another stepping off point for gender, where we just really want to encourage other writers to go in deep and really learn the perspectives of others, and then learn how to write them. 

Crys: I mentioned a couple of my favorite representations of differently abled/physical/mentally flawed characters. And one is Kaladin from the Knights of Radiant’s… Brandon Sanderson’s giant. I think that’s the series.

It’s Way of Kings . That’s what the series is called. His portrayal of Kalidin’s depression is one of the most realistic I’ve seen in fiction that didn’t make it super maudlin and annoying and unrealistic.

And there’s a book that I have not yet met anyone who has read this book, it is probably one of my favorite books in the world because it is the most accurate portrayal of gaslighting and abuse without you realizing that it’s gaslighting and abuse until near the very end. And it’s called Chime by Franny… I think it’s Franny Billingsley. And I love that book because she brings you so close into the characters, told in first person, and it’s a child, you’re brought so close to the character that you believe what she believes. And she is an unreliable narrator because she believes what she has been told, and what she has been told is wrong. I don’t know if that actually makes her an unreliable narrator, but she’s telling the truth that she sees, but she just happens to see the truth terribly wrong.

JP: That made me think of a movie I just recently watched, which was fantastic, called, Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene. This movie, I think just came off of HBO max, but it’s a 2011 dramatic thriller with Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, and some other pretty high characters, but ultimately the story is about  Elizabeth Olsen’s character who just left a cult. And it is done in such a way that you almost understand why she was in the cult, which there are few and far between movies that explain that portion of it. And it’s always about the cult was bad, but you understand why she was in it.

And at no point does it glorify cults, but It just makes you understand why she would have joined this cult, and the acting and it was fantastic. It’s another kind of gaslighting/abuse, really good representation of that kind of approach to a flaw.

Crys: What I like about these representations that we’ve talked about is that none of them offer an end goal in getting over the flaw. It is a process and maybe the character moves far along in their process. I would say that in Sanderson’s Kaladin, he moves pretty far in his process with dealing with his depression, but that throws him right into some other emotional quandaries, which are completely realistic. And we always know that this guy, if his world falls apart again, he’s going straight back into that mental pit.

When it comes to more of the moral flaws, the characters don’t always have to overcome these. I think that having main characters who slowly overcome their moral flaws is useful–is that the right word–are interesting to me.

And the one that comes to mind is Artemis Fowl. It’s a middle-grade book by Eoin Colfer, and Artemis is literally the worst child on the face of this planet. He’s an evil mastermind, possibly a psychopath. And he never really changes on that. And I really liked that about him, but he does slowly learn how to act like a caring, human being, even if it’s just logical for him to start to do that because it makes more sense for him to live in a world where he does occasionally things.

Is that a moral or is that a mental flaw? Because if he’s actually a psychopath, that’s not necessarily something you overcome.

JP: But what he does do is he learns the mental coping mechanisms to interact with the world in a more appropriate manner.

So it may be that he begins to recognize that what he currently is doing is not a good status quo. And so he’s learning coping mechanisms, and this is the same with Kaladin. He learns these coping mechanisms for depression that kind of help him so that maybe he isn’t going to be in such a deep, dark pit at the beginning if something terrible happens later on, maybe it’s a little less deep because he’s able to pull himself out.

Crys: Yeah. And I will say that I hate calling these things flaws. You hear me stumbling over it every time I do because I’m like, “they’re not flaws.” But in the neurotypical view of things, they are seen as flaws.

What I like more than labeling things “flaws”–one, I just like writing differently abled people across the spectrum. But two, I really like digging into the question of “what is the lie the character believes?”

It’s phrased different ways with different writing teachers. But I think that often leads us to that idea of a moral flaw because they believe a lie about the world, and that’s the thing that they need to learn the process to change. That can come from anything.

That can come from having a mental illness or a different operating system for the brain or physical challenges. There can be lies that come from those challenges that lead to moral failings or moral flaws. And I really like focusing on that, like what’s the lie that the character has been taught about the world, and that’s the thing that they need to engage with and find an answer to.

JP: One thing I like doing in thinking about and writing, especially when it comes to either–I personally really like writing trauma as a sort of flaw, apparently I’m a terrible person. But —

Crys: I honestly think part of your problem, JP, is that you haven’t had enough trauma in your real life and you just want to borrow it.

JP: I think that might be the case, but ultimately, like the thing that I really like to think about is the choices that the characters make. Because a lot of the current viewpoint for writers on choices, as what’s your irreconcilable good or your best bad choice. But one thing that I really liked in Lovecraft Country that I would love to mimic is choices that are a hundred percent selfish. And they may or may not have the consequences that you would expect them to have.

And I honestly feel like that is a better representation of the real world, because there are times where you make selfish choices and there are no consequences for it. And even then, the selfish choice may actually be a choice that leads to personal growth.

It may be that selfish choice makes you learn what kind of person you are. Maybe you’re not the caregiving mother that you were forced to be in a role as, but maybe you never got the opportunity to live the life you wanted. So you made a selfish choice, and you learned so much more about yourself, but at the time of that choice, that would have not been the irreconcilable good, nor would that have been the best bad choice because you are potentially are abandoning a family. And so if you were to write that scene, you would almost view abandonment as like this terrible choice and you wouldn’t pick that, but I almost argue to pick it.

Crys: So in that scene example, it would be a mother deciding to leave the child she was forced to give birth to?

JP: Yeah. And what would be the outcome of that? And I think we almost steer clear of that because we’re afraid to make those choices, because I know I am afraid to make those choices cause I’m like, “oh, that’ll alienated people.” But I just highly recommend people watch Lovecraft Country because I didn’t feel alienated at all watching that.

Crys: Other than exploring selfish choices, what are your recommendations for writing flawed characters?

JP: My recommendation would be to take a look at what kind of flaw you are trying to represent on the page. Because characters should have flaws, a hundred percent. But just take a look at what kind of flaw you are writing on page. Try to put it to words because sometimes we write characters and we just have it in our head, “Oh, they have a drinking problem.” A drinking problem can be a myriad of things. Do they suffer from addiction? Where did the addiction come from? How does that stem in their lives? So what does that look like on the page? And then how does a person at that level of addiction, how do they overcome that addiction?

Or how do they learn to cope with it? So if we do take drinking problem, then expand out on that. Look at what that looks like in different venues in media. So I know we talked about Jessica Jones, that character has a heavy drinking problem. But there are times when she learns to cope with it, and there are times where her addiction is actually a driving force in some terrible choices that she makes. And so I think if I were to make a recommendation, it would be write out that flaw and write out what that history of that flaw is and how you actually want to represent that on page.

Crys: I think my recommendation is, number one, challenge the definition of flaws. Look and see whether what you are labeling a flaw is a challenge rather than a flaw. I don’t know. I know I’m digging into my personal biases on what is a flaw on that one. And the other thing would be to question what is the lie your character believes, and what that means for them.

What does that mean about how they view the world? What caused it? With Jessica Jones as our example, I would say that the lie that she believes is… there’s a few, but that’s fine. One, she can’t trust anybody to take care of her. Two, the only way to deal with emotions is to kill them. And three, she can’t escape.

JP: Yup.

I would say those are three of the lies she believes, and she is forced to face them. People challenge her with them, she hasn’t necessarily always listened to them… rarely listens to them. But she’s faced with those lies all the time, and they are either reinforced or challenged, and they formulate her path.

JP: I really like where you’re going with that because if you break down that character with those lies then the follow-up question is how does she cope with those lies? And that’s where you get her drinking problem. And so that can answer your question. If I want to write a character with a drinking problem, do these lies feed into that? Or am I just writing a character with a drinking problem?

Crys: I have done that before, just written a character with a drinking problem because it’s dark! It’s gritty! And sometimes if it’s just a side character, you don’t need to know their entire wound. But if it’s your main character, if it’s your antagonist, if there’s anybody central to the plot, I really like considering what the lie s that the character believes.

JP: Yeah. Excellent. All right. So what is our question for our listeners?

Crys: My question for the listeners is: Can you share an example of one of your favorite flawed characters?

It can be one you’ve created or one you’ve watched or read. I don’t care. I just want to know some really interesting flawed characters, and what your interpretation is of the lie they believe.

JP: Excellent.

Crys: Alrighty. See you next week.

JP: See you later.