on characters

I’m going through a bit of a writing slump these days, so bear with me as I get some stuff off my chest.

Now, I love working on villains as I’m sure most writers do… They are so much more interesting to develop than the good guys, and I think I like creating characters that. They can be ruthless killers, crooked politicians, the clinically insane, a schoolyard bully (I went to school with one that would pick her nose and then try to smush her boogers on you), or a megalomaniac bent on destroying the world and repopulating it with his fearsome robotic slaves. I’ve always had such fun working on background stories and personality traits for those kinds of characters – but heroes on the other hand… it’s the so-called good ones that have always given me trouble.

When I am creating a hero or heroine, I obviously don’t want them to be perfect, because well, that’s boring, however while striving for what I like to call the “opposite of perfection”, they end up less than satisfactory. If too many things are wrong with them (maybe they are blind, deaf orphans living in a Communist country with a lisp and a peg leg?), they can be a difficult character for a reader to believe exists, let alone relate to.

For that reason I have a hard time fleshing them out, and giving them appropriate “flaws” that don’t make them sound like a walking, talking cliché. You know the kind; the brooding young hero that lost both of his parents in a war, his home village ravaged by the enemy, and now he is traveling to find himself - trying to ignore his past even though it haunts him, follows him, hangs over him and every word he says… Hm, that doesn’t sound to bad actually. Perhaps not as interesting as a story about a peg-legged orphan might be, but cliché and all it could maybe make a decent short story? No, no, I kid.