Tammy Letherer Bring to mind someone you know who seems to have it all. You know the kind—the Eternal Optimist, the friend with the Midas Touch, the Big Man on Campus.
Someone like Kim, who was the lead singer at the church I attended. She was talented and vivacious, with a powerhouse voice and energy that lit up the stage. Week after week she performed with a smile on her face while I slouched half-asleep in the pew wondering how she did it.
One Sunday she shared her secret. She said she spent her Sunday afternoons in her pajamas, on her couch, where she would throw back a shot of whiskey and spend the rest of the day alone, napping.
It was her way of rebooting her personality.
Sarah was a girl I knew in college—a full-time student who worked two jobs and was president of a student club. She made it all look easy, and on top of that, she had the nerve to be fit and beautiful. When I got to know her better, I learned that it was not unusual for her to spend an entire day sleeping and eating nothing but a box of croissants.
In both cases, finding out these things not only made me like them better, it made me like myself better.
What a relief to know that nobody’s perfect! If these two supreme beings had some quirks and limitations, maybe there was hope for me.
Imperfection, or struggle, is the key to identification. Eccentricities interest us. And our flaws and failings connect us to one another. This is true in real life and on the page. If you want to create memorable characters, you have to let them be weird and imperfect.
It’s harder than you might think.
Editor and author Philip Martin writes:
The beginning writer tends to create a likable character and then works…to throw a plethora of convoluted plot points at them. In short, these amateurish, unpublished novels are plot, plot, and more plot, happening to fairly predictable characters.
Inexperienced authors also make the mistake of growing to like their protagonists too much; they don’t want their hero or heroine to be too challenging or difficult. But the ones we enjoy the most are often the most unpredictable, from ‘The Cat in the Hat’ to ‘Pippi Longstocking.’ (The Case for Intriguing Eccentricity in Fiction)
James Frey, bestselling author on the craft of fiction writing, says that in order to create a hero worth reading about your protagonist must have a wound, a special talent, and be an outsider in some sense.
The wound can be physical or emotional, recent or past, fully or partially healed.
The special talent can be anything, even if it’s not related to the story. Frey writes in How to Write a Damn Good Mystery that “in the film Lawrence of Arabia, as an example, when we first meet Lawrence he demonstrates that he can hold his finger in a flame. Not much of a special talent, is it? But it is enough to show the viewer that Lawrence is indeed a special person and that is enough to make the viewer identify with him.”
Making your character an outsider in some way is the very point of the story: your hero must learn to navigate an unusual or foreign situation in order to undergo a necessary transformation.
If you’re writing memoir the character is you, and you can’t be afraid to show your own shortcomings or those of your friends and family. Memoir writers tend to have a debilitating fear of writing about real people, which is understandable. We don’t want to cast loved ones in a negative light.
This is only an issue if you write as if nobody’s perfect—except you. But if you’re willing to shine a spotlight on yourself as well as others, your writing will be real, relatable, and responsible.
Maybe you need a shot of whiskey or a box of croissants to be your best self. It’s OK. You’re only human, just like the rest of us.
