Writing Workshop: How to Find Your Character’s Flaw

In my last two workshops, we’ve created a vibrant, fleshed-out character, and Sophia has shown you how to create an intriguing premise for the story your character is meant to explore. However, every protagonist still needs a flaw. No one wants to read about a Mary Sue who has no problems, no internal conflict, and no flaws that need to be addressed.

Flaws can create characters who feel real and relatable and who struggle with some of the same things that real-life people do. But, when done incorrectly, flaws can feel tacked on — a box to be checked and moved on from.

And let’s be honest — flaws are hard! They’re some of my least favorite parts of writing because I love my characters so much. I want my readers to relate to them, as well, and it is so hard to run the risk of alienating people with a flawed character in an attempt to make them feel real and give them a genuine internal battle to fight as they make it through the plot, past the climax, and toward the finish line.

So in this workshop, I’ll show you exactly how to create a flaw for your character in a way that makes sense. And while I can’t guarantee that certain people won’t be put off by your character’s flaws or find her less relatable because of them, I can guarantee that this method will give you a fuller, more complete version of your character.

How NOT to Write A Flaw

For this workshop, like before, I’ll use the character we developed in the last two workshops as an example. If you need a refresher, go check those out here and here before moving on! And when you get back, it’s worthwhile to note what makes a bad flaw.

Most writers look at their characters’ flaws like this:

What a relief! Our character is sufficiently flawed, and we can move on to far more important aspects of writing.

But, on further inspection, this flaw doesn’t really accomplish much. In fact, it’s just a symptom of a deeper flaw that is much more important to flesh out. What happens if your protagonist goes on a long journey, away from the friend she used to fight with? Then what happened to her flaw? Your character’s flaw should be deep enough that it doesn’t disappear when circumstances change — it just resurfaces in a different way.

Besides, most flaws don’t stay in their neat little boxes in real life, anyway. Pride can mean your character might not accept they’re wrong in an argument, but it also might mean that they won’t enter a competition for fear of humiliation and failure. With only a surface level of your character’s flaw (they can’t admit they’re wrong), you can miss the bigger picture and the ways that the underlying flaw (pride) actually manifests itself in many different ways throughout their life. Unless you plan to write for very small children, flaws should never be as simple as “fighting with a friend” or “can’t admit they’re wrong.”

That means we need a deeper understanding of this specific character’s flaw, and what’s really driving the fights she seems to be having with her friend. To do that, I’m going to show two different methods if you’re starting from scratch.

Method 0

“But wait!” someone says. “I’m not starting from scratch! I have a very specific image of two friends fighting, and I just have to work it in!”

This is a legitimate conundrum, and there is an excellent way to take your crystal-clear image of a very specific instance of a character’s flaw in a real-life situation and find out what really drives it. But because the majority of characters won’t come with a prepackaged flaw scene, this method probably won’t be used very often. Therefore, it’s Method 0 — what to do on the off chance that you have a very specific scene of a very specific flaw stuck in your head.

So let’s return to the original idea and try to get a deeper flaw out of it.

Let’s pretend that I have a very specific scene in my mind of my character arguing with her friend. Remember back in the very first workshop, where we said she occasionally roams the street singing songs to herself, because it’s fun and she doesn’t care what people think about her? Let’s say she does that when she’s walking with her friend somewhere, and he gets a little annoyed.

Friend [irritated as people start to stare]: “Will you stop?” 

Protagonist [is insulted]: “Why should I? I’m not bothering anyone.”

Friend: “You’re bothering me.”

Protagonist: “Why? You don’t care when we sing together.”

Friend: “Yeah, because that’s private. This isn’t. People are starting to stare.”

Protagonist [shrugging]: “I don’t know why you care.”

Now, how can we get a core flaw from this very short bit of dialogue? Once again, let’s ask “why” and see what comes up. Specifically, let’s look at what these two characters want in this scene.

Our protagonist’s want is pretty clear: she wants to enjoy herself (as usual).

Her friend’s want is also pretty clear: he doesn’t want to attract attention to himself, because it makes him uncomfortable.

Let’s assume that our protagonist knows that her friend can be a little self-conscious and hates attention. So our protagonist is willing to enjoy herself, even at his expense. She knows that drawing attention to them will make him uncomfortable, but she does it anyway.

We’re getting closer, but we don’t have her flaw quite yet.

So let’s ask what this shows about her. She’s preferring her own enjoyment over her friend’s comfort. I personally think that makes her selfish.

But maybe our free-spirit character isn’t as bad as the flaw “selfish” sounds. Maybe she simply forgot that her friend is self-conscious and probably won’t like her drawing attention to them. That’s not as bad as being blatantly selfish, but it’s still essentially selfishness, because she wasn’t thinking about her friend. It might have been an innocent mistake, but it’s still a mistake, and something she can work on.

All right, so our character is in general self-centered, but specifically she tends to be thoughtless. 90% of the time she’s not acting badly because she thought about it, but because she simply failed to think about how her actions could affect others. That’s definitely something she needs to work on, and hopefully a flaw that the story she’s in will resolve.

But what if you don’t have a preset scene in your head? Most characters  (at least in my experience) don’t come with their own flaw. Instead, one has to be thought up. Well, that brings me to the two main methods of this workshop — the methods that I use most often and probably will come up the most for you, too.

How To Find Your Character’s Flaw: Use Extremes

They say that every good thing is a “golden mean” between two extremes. Cake is good, but not the whole thing. And no cake at all isn’t great, either. Almost anything (even water, exercise, and love) can be taken too far and, essentially, that’s what a good flaw is — a good thing that your character has taken too far. Something that is good enough in its very essence that a character is blinded to how far they’ve taken it.

So for these two methods, we take things too far and see how that would affect our protagonist. First we’ll take our character’s desire too far, and then what happens when we take her fear too far. (If you don’t know what your character’s goal, desire, or fear are, go check out my workshop on that here!)

Method #1: Take the Desire to An Unhealthy Extreme

The first step here is to find the character’s desire. Since we already have that, we don’t have to worry about this step. After that, brainstorm ways that you can take your desire way too far. I wrote out a visual guide to help me, like this.

Now let’s plug in this character’s specific desire.

It’s the same desire as before — to enjoy herself, to have fun and love life. That’s not a terrible desire. In fact, it’s one that all of us share. But it can pretty easily be taken too far. What if she becomes so focused on her own desire that she stops thinking about what other people want? What if she becomes thoughtless and doesn’t consider ways that what she’s doing could hurt others, or ways that she could use her skills to help those around her?

If this is starting to sound familiar, you’re on to something. We just have to take this extreme and figure out what particular flaw it is expressing.

Essentially, this extreme is making our character self-centered and thoughtless — the very same flaw that we found using the method above! The scene that we had in mind just took an unusual path to asking the same questions — how has this character’s desire expanded to unhealthy proportions? How is it hurting those around her? How could she improve it?

That’s part of why it’s Method 0 and not Method 1 — it’s not actually a different method, it’s just a different way of approaching the other two methods we’ll use in this workshop.

Method 2: Take the Fear to an Unhealthy Extreme

At this point, you guys know the drill. We need a fear, an extreme, and maybe a flow chart if we’re having trouble thinking of how our character’s fear can become an extreme. Let’s plug in our fear and see what happens!

So how can we take this perfectly reasonable fear (pain) to an unhealthy extreme? Let’s consider what happens when this character puts the fear of pain above all else.

This extreme could have some pretty serious consequences. What if, in a moment of stress, she becomes so overwhelmed by her fear of pain and deprivation that she fails to act when it is necessary? What if she lets her fear of pain keep her from taking risks or doing rewarding things? What if she becomes terrified that her mistakes will cause her or her friends pain, so she stays strictly within her own comfort zone, and refuses to leave for anything?

All of this is pretty understandable, but taken too far or applied at the wrong time, it can make for disastrous results. If you ask me, this character seems to have a pretty serious flaw.

Our character is a bit of a coward. She’s so paralyzed by her fears that she struggles to do the right thing when the time comes, or to take risks when they are necessary. 

Evaluation

We now have two flaws for our character. It’s important to recognize that one might work better for a different kind of story than another. For example, in an action-adventure story, having a coward as a character would have a much greater impact than one who is merely forgetful. Meanwhile, if you have a calmer, slice-of-life story, without much action or dramatic risks, then having “cowardice” as a flaw might not come up almost at all. 

If nothing else, one genre or another will do a great job at highlighting your flaw, while one will serve to downplay it, thus diminishing character development and making your character’s arc a much more tame one. So take the frame of your plot and genre and consider which flaw would best serve your story.

Congratulations! You now have a sufficient flaw that will set the groundwork for your character’s arc and influence the other characters around her. Flaws can sow the seeds of a plot, theme, and character arc, and they’re absolutely crucial to nail down.