Making Your Character Fallible

We all know that having your main character be right, both morally "My opinion is the right one" and informationally "I know what we have to do!" all the time is a major Mary Sue trait. However, how would you go about keeping them from being infallible without being pathetic? Engineering a situation specifically for your hero to be in the wrong seems a little contrived to me. And making your character wrong too much either makes them lame or a jerk.

How do you do it?

Give them a flaw. Specifically, figure out one particular type of case or event that will cause them to behave irrationally, or give them one persistent false belief. Then figure out cases where this will screw them over.

Example: Alexander is the superpowered bodyguard, trained from the age of nine, et cetera. Really really competent, and more dynamic on a tactical level than the person he's guarding. He thinks that he's invulnerable—not intellectually, but having never faced anyone who can actually beat him, he tends to jump to "fight and win" as an easy conclusion. Later on, when he faces the one guy with a bigger gamebreaker power than him and a few people who can kind of Mind Rape him into submission, he's too quick to defend her rather than himself—thinking that he's invulnerable—and causes some major problems.

That's what he meant by engineering a situation.

My advice? Give them their flaws, and let the plot play out in a rational way that doesn't go out of its way to point out their flaws or ignore them. When trying situations for your flawed character develop naturally as a consequence of the plot, instead of as a shoehorned addition, they feel more real, and have some oomph.

edited 19th Jan '12 11:58:45 AM by KSPAM

Give your character the sort of personality that will naturally lead to them being wrong every once in a while. If your character's personality, in combination with the story they are in, does not naturally lead to situations where they are wrong, then you should tinker with the character's personality, not the story.

So a character's personality is like a landscape and the story is like a river, and if you want to have waterfalls then the landscape needs to be such that they naturally occur instead of being shoehorned in.

Well, how do you recognize fallible people in the real world? They fail.

In plot terms, you put one or more obstacles between your protagonist and hir goals. S/he tries to overcome an obstacle and fails. If s/he is angsty, s/he will beat hirself up for it.

You define your characters with (among other things) their goals, their reactions to failure, and their motivations to keep going forward.

Flaws, failures, have them be outright wrong (factually, morally, whatever), quite a few ways to do it.

The thing with flaws is you want to integrate them in your character, such that it stems inherently from the character's nature. The strong people like Othello can fall into bouts of brooding, and violent destruction of their perceived enemies when they're peeved. The genre of character tragedy works in conjunction with this.

What is less preferable (but still acceptable sometimes, for things like pulp) is an arbitrary flaw piled on, just for the sake of "Um.. flaws, flaws, he's afraid of snakes!" Such Kryptonite flaws are just that, last-second addendum to the character's costume.

The natural flaws are weaved intrinsically into the very fibre of being. These flaws can be overcome by character development; how aware one is of his tendencies lends to how fallible as a character one can be.

edited 19th Jan '12 3:24:09 PM by QQQQQ

I find it's easy to make characters fallible if you start liking their enemies and whatnot just as much as them. Then it's easier to make the wins be more spread out, because you want your other characters to win out just as much as other ones.

Considering that you're wondering about one character's "rightness" - you can try doing it so the character's nature is "always trying to do right", and although he tries his best, sometimes his self-righteousness overtakes what he has to say and he might get called out on it.

Or, the "rightness" might stem from a narcissism of being show-offy and demonstrative: 'I'm Buzz Lightyear! I'm always right!' and he could have flaws with his egotism.

Sometimes a character's fallibility isn't from how wrong he gets things, it can come from the reasons why he shouldn't get it wrong. I think the idea of Mary Sue has led many a writer astray on what an ideal characters should strive to be.

edited 19th Jan '12 3:38:32 PM by QQQQQ

I certainly agree with that - overall, identifying the concept has done far more harm then good.

I agree with what Q said. Flaws should be a part of what makes the character who they are, not just a tack on.

There's two ways of seeing that, though. On the one hand, you don't want to give your character artificially manufactured traits of any kind that exist just for a specific narrative role. But on the other hand, if you base absolutely everything in a character's personality around some specific concept, you'll get a rather contrived and unrealistic character. So it's a balancing act.

I've got the weakness as the theme of the story (not plot, the theme). Gabriel is a psychologist/Psychoanalyst who's one of the top in his field of 'Criminal Psychology' (Its made up, the correct term would be 'Forensic Psychologist', his job is the McGuffin), looking for personality disorders in prisoners. He is hyper competent with his mates relationships, he's always there if you need him. Women find him adorkable (and I reference David Mitchell's Trope page at one point!), and he could easily have any woman he wanted.

BUT he can't cope with his own relationships - they fall apart, or are generally crappy, often because he ends up with the wrong kind of woman (and he is still beating himself up over losing his One True Love 25 years before).He gives too much, but wouldn't think of asking his mates for help back, so is constantly tense because of his crappy marriage.

There's your fallibility - his private life is the complete opposite to his public persona. Then the One True Love reappears in his life...

If you can't think of a flaw for your character right off the bat, that doesn't necessarily doom him. Try writing out his interactions with other characters, and building on whatever pattern appears. (For instance, if your character repeatedly distrusts others, you can have him screw up by distrusting someone who turns out to genuinely have his best interests in mind. The downside of this is that if you previously had him blindly trust someone, you may have to go back and revise a bit.)

edited 19th Jan '12 7:02:42 PM by feotakahari

The simplest way to make a character fallible is to have them fail. And not the pissy, "they lost something minor" kind of failure, either. Actual, plot-important, fair and square failure.

^ And it better not be tacked on, Deus ex Machina type stuff or just plain "Hurr, he/she failed, he/she is thus not Mary Sue". Basically, show how he/she failed or lost and have it built that maybe the character wasn't good enough at something, or fast enough, or clever enough or that others were better at it, or ya know the thousand or so other reasons that happen in reality every day.

Also, it doesn't necessarily have to be plot important. Sometimes the greatest developments, explorations or interactions of or between characters happen when there is little to no plot advancement. Basically show they have a life outside the story.

edited 19th Jan '12 7:16:03 PM by MajorTom

What if your character seems to be made of flaws, doesn't see themselves that way, and hides their good points deep inside?

^ Then they will be called an Anti-Sue by at least some readers. (Cases in point.)

edited 19th Jan '12 7:41:15 PM by feotakahari

Introduce a distance between the author's voice and the character, no matter who your narrator is. Your character can be wrong and convinced that [s]he's right.

And, sometimes, it's fine to be pathetic. It's inevitable.

A little bit of a question. Would you say having a character whose entire past consists of critical failures thanks to their respective character flaws win the one conflict of the story is a cop-out for actually having them fail on-screen (even if they do need a bit of help to manage it)?

KSPAM

I think it would be fine if you make sure to include some exposition about the characters life beforehand.

My characters aren't always the good guys.

One of my characters, John, takes the most advanced technological achievement of the 21st Century and tries to use it for his own selfish ends but fails all the time, however, this is explained by the fact the time machine can't change anything that has happened in the past. It's a historical factual tool designed to see what actually happened in the past, but can travel to the future.

He's also an alcoholic jerk.

edited 20th Jan '12 12:01:16 PM by Steventheman

Well yeah, it's a big part of her character, really. On the surface, you could easily peg her main flaws as simply excessive hedonism and an alcohol problem, but it's more than that. Really, while she does legitimately mean that she just wants to make herself and other people happy, the main motivation behind it is to try and basically drown her own demons in pleasure, in the hopes of forgetting her many haunting and fantastic fuckups (one of them being failing to stop WWII).

It's sort of a third free love, a third atonement, and a third Drowning My Sorrows.

Men are akin to rabbits, we like following patterns. Flaws are negative and destructive patterns that we develop over time.

Think Ridiculous Procrastinator or Brilliant, but Lazy.

KSPAM, if the character never fails onscreen, that's a simple Informed Ability issue. Whether it's a problem depends on the length of the work, the nature of the failures and successes, and the repercussions. If we're told the character always loses fights (and/or always lost fights in the past), but we see him/her win 20 fights in a row in the story, then that's a problem. If the character lost a really important fight in the past and the story is about him/her struggling with a sense of failure and eventually overcoming it and winning a victory, then it's fine. Yours sounds more towards the latter.