The beauty of flawed characters
How often are you bored by characters in films that look beautiful and can do no wrong? Everyone loves them, they have deep pockets, endless love and breeze around with an impeccable sense of humour. It makes them unrelatable and, quite often, impossible to root for.
The Problem with Perfect Characters
It’s not easy to let our characters breathe, to give our protagonists imperfections and our villains an unexpected softness. But imperfection is human and central to writing a believable character. Not only does that add realism to a piece of fiction, or a TV show, or a play, it also adds the things that make us fall in love with a character.
The Importance of Imperfection
Whatever genre you write, however much you build a world or a race, your characters must be credible. If you find that something seems flat about your heroine or your antagonist is coming off cartoony (when you’re not trying to write them that way), look at just how perfect you have made them. Somehow perfection, unless exquisitely written, makes a character one-dimensional.
