Writing Advice: Flaws
This writing question comes from @ArielWa21574742 on Twitter: “How do you come up with flaws or bad traits for mostly good characters?”
This is a great question. You need flaws for even your good characters, obviously. Nobody likes the good guy who’s TOO good. More importantly, your good characters need room to grow for the story to be interesting. They need to make mistakes.
So the flaw can’t be one of those trick interview question answers like “oh, my biggest weakness is that I’m such a perfectionist that I do a fantastic job on everything.” And they can’t be so trivial that they won’t matter to the story in any way, like that they pick wildflowers even though you’re not supposed to.
There are two broad cases here and the way you pick the flaws is a little different, so I’ll talk about main characters first and then your side characters.
Flaws in main characters are almost easier because you are looking to give them something to grow out of, so that by the end of the story they’ve gotten better. Not all the way better, of course, but better in one specific way. Let’s talk about Zootopia for a minute.
Judy is a pretty good character. She has a couple flaws: one, she thinks she knows best (as a rookie cop, she argues with her boss about her assignment; she pre-judges Nick when she first sees him). Two, she doesn’t always think through her actions (she abandons her post to chase Duke Weaselton; she doesn’t think about how her words at the press conference will affect Nick). These aren’t unforgivable flaws; in fact, they’re relatable. They affect the story—the flaws together lead to her telling Mrs. Otterton that she’ll take her case. But her good qualities, her honesty and her courage, impress Nick enough that in the end he becomes her ally. Your main character’s good qualities will need to work to rescue them from their flaws.
Nick (I’ll treat him as a main character) also has flaws. He doesn’t have respect for or trust anyone else (that we meet), which leads to him being alone. This flaw also gets him in trouble: if he’d just answered Judy’s question about Otterton, she might’ve walked away and never bothered him again. But he had to get sassy because he didn’t feel Judy deserved his respect. In the end, though, his good qualities—cleverness and adaptability—lead him not only to get through the case with Judy, but to no longer be alone at the end of the story.
Nick is still disrespectful and Judy is still impulsive, but they make their flaws work when they’re together. Another thing to note is that their big flaws, the story ones, are related: Judy thinking she knows best is akin to Nick’s lack of respect for anyone else. Both characters are very insular in how they experience the world, and both need to learn from others to broaden their worldview.
When you’re creating main character flaws, there’s the big ones, which are kind of what the story is about, and then there are the smaller ones, which give flavor to the character. This second kind is what you’ll think about when you create side characters as well; these are things common to everyone. But the big flaws, the one the main character will hopefully work on during the story, those need to be relevant to the story. Ideally the main character’s big flaw will be the thing keeping them from getting the thing they want. If you can, it helps to give the villain the same flaw; showing the hero the wrong way to address their flaw is helpful (and can be tempting! Darth Vader’s offer to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back is a great moment because we know that Luke wants power—the power to save his friends and do the right thing—and Vader has been corrupted by that same flaw).
When it comes to side characters and smaller flaws, it helps to think about annoying things that you’ve observed, or even that you do or have thought about doing yourself. From a story standpoint, it helps if you can make that work for the plot, in both a positive and negative way. A side character’s flaw can get the hero in trouble, like when Rocket Raccoon steals batteries at the beginning of Guardians 2, but the Guardians of the Galaxy movies are also a good example of how side characters with distinct flaws can join together to smooth out each other’s flaws.
There are cases where you might want the side characters to take a larger role, and then you can do things like give them “main character” flaws. All of the Guardians have family issues and therefore trust issues, but most of them have secondary flaws that are not fixed by them having a family. Their flaws are where a lot of the comedy comes from.
If you’re struggling to think of what flaw to assign people, the seven deadly sins are a good place to start: Avarice, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust, Pride, Anger, Envy. You can vary the degree depending on how big a flaw you want to create, but many flaws originate from one of these seven (Judy and Nick’s could both be called Pride).
Flaws are part of what round out characters and make them real, and they’re critical to writing a story because they spur characters to make mistakes that they can learn from. You need to find the balance between making your characters too good and making them unlikeable. Read stories, watch shows, and try to identify the flaws in the characters and how they affect the plot. Learn from that and keep working at it!