Home: Writing for Comic Books: Chapter Three - Character Development: The Fatal Flaw

Chapter Three
Character Development
(cont'd)

THE FATAL FLAW

Nobody is perfect. Building a fatal flaw (or flaws) into your characters makes them more human. For a hero, the flaw is something that they fight against that will make them appear more heroic. In a tragedy, it is a character's fatal flaw that will ultimately lead to his or her downfall.

Fatal flaws can be physical: a short leg, literal blindness, an allergy, kryptonite. These elements limit your characters and make them fallible.

The flaw can be emotional/psychological: a short temper, a traumatic family history, irrational fears. Again, these are things that will hold you character back and make them more interesting.

In heroic fiction, the fatal flaw is the part of your protagonist's character that he or she must fight against and overcome. This makes them appear all the more heroic and all the more human. Taking it a step further into the realm of the super-heroic, you want to develop characters that have inherent weaknesses so that they don't become omnipotent--it's hard to develop sufficient threats and challenges if your character is god-like in nature.

STEREOTYPES AND DIVERSITY

In today's politically correct society, "diversity" and "multiculturalism" have become watchwords. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on the goal and skill of the writer.

I am a strong believer in diversity when developing a cast of a story. The more diverse a cast, the more perspectives represented by a cast, the more possibility for conflict and therefore, drama. Even the best of friends don't always see eye to eye on things, and that can lead to interesting story possibilities. As I have stated previously, it is important that all of the characters have some connection to each other or to the plot, either physically (family, work, circumstance, etc.) or thematically (similar hopes or dreams, but different methods to achieve their goals, etc.). When new characters are introduced in serial fiction, they usually have some connection to another member of the cast, either by blood or circumstance that allows the characters and the audience relate to them. (They also usually have some kind of secret as discussed in previous chapters.) Without the connection, the audience usually is slow to accept the characters, and sometimes they are never accepted or are flat out resented. Generally speaking, the closer to the main (tent pole) characters the new characters are, the sooner they will be accepted, as long as they aren't forced on the audience. It takes time for an audience to care about a character, and it is something that shouldn't be rushed. Audiences generally resent new characters that take time away from the characters they've come to care about if they haven't had a chance to get to know and take an interest in the new characters.

An interesting example of the alienation factor is the Fox TV show Malcolm in the Middle. As good and funny as the show is, the scenes of the oldest brother at military school (or whatever far-flung location they've sent him for each season) are usually so disconnected from the proceedings at home that they feel intrusive. I often wished they would drop that element. He is so far removed from the rest of the family/show that I don't even remember his name. There must be a reason why the character exists.

Don't let all of your characters be exactly the same as each other. That will get boring. Mix up your cast by age, gender, race, religious background--not only does it open up story possibilities, it also makes your story accessible to the largest possible audience. Given the shrinking nature of the comic book audience, the more you can do to pull in readers, the better off you are.

The flip side to this argument is that if you bring in diverse characters simply for the sake of diversity with no real thought to the reason why this character exists within the context of the story, then you are doing your audience a disservice. I have written projects where the publisher or licensor has dictated that there must be four lead characters: two boys, two girls, one White, one Black, one Hispanic, one Asian. Sometimes one must have a physical (dare I use this politically charged term?) handicap. While I agree it's important to be inclusive in our casts of characters, don't ever let it become a template. It may not be logical when writing your American Civil War drama that there be an Asian best friend or a Southern Belle in a wheelchair. The cast must make sense within the world you are portraying.

Be very careful when employing stereotypes. In Greek drama where stereotypes were originally created and employed, they had a very specific meaning and served an important function--they were a form of shorthand, a character with a universally understood costume/mask/make-up design that allowed the audience to immediately to recognize the role the character fulfilled in the course of the drama: king, slave, hero, etc. Today, the concept of stereotype has taken on a very different and very negative meaning.

Stereotypes sometimes have at their core some element of truth, but the danger is when you use that "truth" to apply to all members of a group of people. If for some reason you are going to employ a stereotype within the course of your story for whatever reason, it's a good idea to balance it in some way, shape, or form--either by giving the stereotypical character additional depth or having another character of the same race/creed/color that works against the stereotype so that the audience can't claim you see a group of people in a singular, offensive way.

PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE

When you are writing about characters that have very different backgrounds than yourself, it's very important that you do your research so that you can convey the characters in a believable fashion. While it may be acceptable in some cases simply to change the skin color of a secondary character in order to add diversity to your cast, that may not work as well if the character plays a major role in the plot. You have to be able to convey different races, religions, genders with believability. It's very important that any artist expose him or herself to as many different types of people and situations as possible--and preferably not through works of fiction! The more you know and understand, the more you can write about.

However, the bottom line is that people are people. We all have common emotions that transcend gender, race, or culture: love, hate, joy, fear, jealousy, anger, etc. How we handle these emotions may be dictated by our personal histories and society--and this is where research come into play--but tapping into these emotions will make your characters feel more real. I remember reading an interview conducted with novelist Armisted Maupin where he was asked how he, as a gay man, could write such convincing love stories for his lesbian characters. His response was that love is love and how we respond to it is with the same beating heart, sweaty palms, longing glances, and jumbled words. This reaction has nothing to do with gender, race, or sexual identity. Emotions are emotions. If you get to the truth of the emotion, then the character will come across as a living, breathing human.