Giving Your MC Faults

Adrianna Burch said:

For example, The boyfriend "forgot" to invite me to dinner with he and his sister who was only in town for a couple days. I was so pissed I couldn't stop shaking for hours, but when I talked to him about it he realized how much he upset me and made up for it. He got caught up in the excitement and even though it's a crappy excuse, it's an understandable one.

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I don't understand why him not inviting you to dinner with him and his sister is such a bad thing, unless you knew the sister. If that was in a novel, I'm afraid I would find the girlfriend the unsympathetic one (this is out of context- I don't know about your personal life).

gothicangel said:

Depends on what you mean by 'hero.' Personally, I have no interest in heroes who go about saving kittens from trees, or doing what is 'brave' or 'right.'

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Which may serve to underscore a point the OP needs to keep in mind--where's the audience? Because with audiences who are so widely divergent in their tastes, it's going to be difficult or impossible to create a main character who will appeal to both.

I do think AloneBadman has an amazingly good point, however:

You don't want to overload on character faults. It's something I've seen plague protagonists to give them a sense of depth. I've seen too many basket cases that use psychological issues or character flaws to substitute for three dimensional depth. It's no better than the perfect knight and shining armour archetype

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To the which I'll add, a character who is a hero in the traditional sense--that is, a decent human being who tries to do what's honorable, kind and merciful--can be altogether as psychologically complex and three-dimensional as his opposite number, if the author takes care to make him so.

scarletpeaches said:

The reader doesn't have to like the characters; they just have to understand why they do what they do.

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This.

And what Bill said as well; the MC can't be so unlikeable nobody would read the book, although a MC has to be pretty awful to do that.

In your case my guess is one of two things happened, and not reading it I have no idea which:

1. You didn't do a good enough job of grounding who your character was, so when they are saying he's too much of a dick and it needs to be changed, they mean that scene stuck out and didn't mesh with how they interpreted your character so far, meaning it was a "fail" on your part because the actions felt false

2. The person(s) who complained are full of shit and you need better betas. some folks like to try to ake the world they'd like to see, instead of dealing with the one they live in


it could be either one....

L.C. Blackwell said:

Because with audiences who are so widely divergent in their tastes, it's going to be difficult or impossible to create a main character who will appeal to both.

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That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Write what you would like to read and appeal to that audience. I would choose a book by Rosemary Sutcliff, Ben Kane or Robert Fabbri over the Simon Scarrow and Anthony Riches.

To the which I'll add, a character who is a hero in the traditional sense--that is, a decent human being who tries to do what's honorable, kind and merciful--can be altogether as psychologically complex and three-dimensional as his opposite number, if the author takes care to make him so.

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I don't think I ever said that they can't be psychologically complex. That style of MC doesn't appeal to me. Morally ambigious MC's do. I like my fiction dark, and also have academic interests in Gothic Literature.

I also think overloading an MC with flaws in a newbie error. It's a mistake I rarely come across in my editorial work.

Lady Ice said:

I don't understand why him not inviting you to dinner with him and his sister is such a bad thing, unless you knew the sister. If that was in a novel, I'm afraid I would find the girlfriend the unsympathetic one (this is out of context- I don't know about your personal life).

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We had planned to eat together and when I sent him a text asking what he and I were making for her, he told me I was eating alone and they were going out to dinner without me.

So, I've been thinking about this for a while and I guess what I really want to ask is a couple questions: first of all does your character have a flaw or is your character flawed? I've read books and seen tv and movies where characters are injected with one or more flaws not because they really make sense but as a substitute for depth.

There are a lot of cheap tricks to avoid giving characters legitimate depth.

The whole cast of my sci-fi story is seriously flawed. None of them are batshit crazy, but they have over years of tough experiences developed various pathological tendencies that make harsh amoral behaviors their first choice in any situation. They are very much the "Bad men doing the work of the good guys"

By contrast in the fantasy piece I'm working on the heroes are genuinely good guys. They may like to complain a little and they put on tough fronts, but they are the heroes who do the right thing because it's the right thing.

I think one of the key factors in the differences of the two sets of characters for me is faith. In the sci-fi piece most of the characters have no real faith or have lost any that they might have had. God, if God exists at all, is seen as remote and uncaring. In the fantasy piece there are deities and magic active in the world so there is hope and faith and motivation to be better.

(Please note that my "if God exists at all" is intended solely to refer to God's existence within the context of the story and is not meant to reflect on the real world at all)

So, the final question for all of us is: why do our characters act they way they do and why did we give them the flaws that they have? If you can answer these questions to your own satisfaction then you should have no problem.

gothicangel said:

L.C. Blackwell said:

Because with audiences who are so widely divergent in their tastes, it's going to be difficult or impossible to create a main character who will appeal to both.

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That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Write what you would like to read and appeal to that audience.

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Agreed absolutely. I just think it's something that tends to get lost in discussions like this; and for someone who's not an experienced writer, they can easily feel like they're getting contradictory advice--especially with so many passionate opinions in the mix.

In this case, it sounds like the OP missed the mark with the audience. Maybe it was in the writing, maybe it just wasn't the right audience for that piece.

Skipping back to Quick's comment, I really have a problem with the idea that the OP might need "better betas." Different betas, possibly. But just because they have a different worldview/taste in literature/what-have-you is not a fair reason to assume they're "full of shit." Rather, they may not be a good fit for this author, or work.

Throwing tantrums is a flaw? Storming off is a flaw? Huh! I learn all kinds of things here. Some of it is rot. IMHO, there are only two types of MCs who deserve to be banned to the incinerator: boring ones, and oh-so-wondrously wonderful ones.

Also, everyone is not a team player. So what?

I'd probably like your guy.

WriteMinded said:

Throwing tantrums is a flaw? Storming off is a flaw?

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In that it implies a lack of maturity, self control, and consideration for other people's feelings, yes.

Adrianna Burch said:

We had planned to eat together and when I sent him a text asking what he and I were making for her, he told me I was eating alone and they were going out to dinner without me.

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Ouch, that is a snub. :/

Yes, yes it was. But he won't do it again, that's for sure.

Everyone's different, but I just don't enjoy reading a book about a character I don't like or care about. They don't have to rush around rescuing kittens, but they can't go around killing kittens. I remember a brief reference in Mr Polly to him drowning 'unwanted' kittens and I had to take a deep breath and pretend I hadn't read that line before I could carry on reading.

One book I read a couple of years back (and whose title I keep getting wrong, so today I'm not even going to *try*) managed to make a torturer sympathetic to me. In fact he was the only character in the book I cared about at all. So the character doesn't have to be angelic for me to like them. It's all in the writing.