Authors Speak Out - Selah Janel

Broke Characters

One of my favorite things about writing and reading books is the infinite amount of character personalities I get to explore. I love the possibility a person or creature can represent, so it’s disturbing to me to see the growing trend of protagonists who are likeable and not much else. I don’t know if this is a carryover from the young adult or some romance genres, or if people are plain afraid to branch out a little with their leading men and ladies. I don’t know if we’re reaching a stage where readers don’t respond well to flawed characters or if authors are afraid to distance readers, but I personally find it annoying.

Here’s my deal: I’m not perfect. I don’t want to read about perfect characters because that just makes me feel disconnected and, honestly, slightly inferior. It’s fine if a character is likeable – they don’t need to be a disturbing maniac – but if that’s their major or only personality trait, the plot becomes a bunch of stuff happening to them while they try to keep up. There’s nothing wrong with that, but eventually if a person doesn’t mature or grow, it gets really old, repetitive, and, frankly, juvenile.

Granted, things can swing the opposite way, as well. Broken characters are great because they give us a chance to see them redeemed and put back together. However, a character that’s completely irredeemable or who has more issues than Cosmo that are constantly, constantly, CONSTANTLY coming up in the exact same way just to provide drama? No, thanks. There’s drama and there’s angst for angst’s sake. It’s a tight balancing act, to be sure, but I believe it can be pulled off.

As a reader, the majority of the stories I connect with have protagonists with problems. The Greek heroes were getting up to all sorts of unsavory practices, fairy tale heroes and heroines aren’t always the brightest bulbs in the socket, and as larger-than-life as characters like Batman can be, their personal problems always come back to haunt them and always make things interesting. I think it’s important for us to not always like the characters we read, or to have to choose or defend why we like them as thinking, feeling readers.

As an author, I love the challenge of writing characters with quirks I may not personally agree with. I’ve even had a few protagonists that I completely disliked until I really got a chance to figure out why they were making the decisions they did. I think it’s become a weird misconception that authors secretly always write themselves into their protagonists to a certain degree, or at least agree with them, and that’s not the case at all…or else I have way more in common with anxious trolls, 1800s-era vampires, or demonic rock stars than I realized.

We all have our shortcomings, our selfish moments, our anxieties, our traumas, our moments we’re not proud of. My personal belief is that everyone you encounter has a story, and it’s more than likely that there’s at least one chapter in it that’s not so pleasant. What’s more, is that there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how we develop empathy for each other and the stories we immerse ourselves with, it’s how we learn how to grow and develop as people, how we can find the ability to see something heroic in ourselves, despite or because of our flaws. How can we begin to understand that we can do awesome things no matter what, if the idea we hold up is a cardboard, bland, perfect nicey-nice protagonist? While I understand wanting to write perfect versions of life, it’s a shame that we’re shying away from using that as a way to enrich our stories.

So what about you out there in Readerland? Do broken characters drawn you in or turn you off? Is there a “right” way to write flawed characters, or a point where things get to be too much and turn you off? Who’s your favorite flawed character, and why?

About Selah Janel

Author Bio:

Selah Janel has been blessed with a giant imagination since she was little and convinced that fairies lived in the nearby state park or vampires hid in the abandoned barns outside of town. The many people around her that supported her love of reading and curiosity probably made it worse. Her e-books The Other Man, Holly and Ivy, and Mooner are published through Mocha Memoirs Press. Lost in the Shadows, a collection of short stories celebrating the edges of ideas and the spaces between genres was co-written with S.H. Roddey. Her work has also been included in The MacGuffin, The Realm Beyond, Stories for Children Magazine, The Big Bad: an Anthology of Evil, The Grotesquerie, and Thunder on the Battlefield. Olde School is the first book in her new series, The Kingdom City Chronicles, and is published through Seventh Star Press. She likes her music to rock, her vampires lethal, her fairies to play mind games, and her princesses to hold their own.

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