Giving Your Characters Flaws and Goals 

EelKat on Character Creation


By EelKat Wendy C Allen

Well, this page was written in 2017 and hasn't been updated since. I think it's time for an update. Don't you? Today is June 22, 2021, let's update this page...

Character Flaws and Goals
How clear does an author have to be about the morals of their characters? 

>>>How clear does an author have to be about the morals of their characters? 


I believe that the best characters are "grey".

Good characters can do bad things, bad characters can do good things.

Heroes can be cruel.

Villains can feed the homeless.

Readers know this is the hero, but they know he's not a saint.

They know this guy is the villain, but they know he's not evil for the sake of being evil - he has a motive: revenge, greed, etc. driving him to do bad things, but he may not actually be a bad person.

That said, I don't think the author has to be specific on the morals of the characters. Real people can change their morals so why can't fictional characters? Real people often have conflicting morals, so why can't fictional characters?

>>>We live in an era of heightened moral sensitivity. There is great concern about fixing the many social ills of the world and one of the chief areas of this is in fiction.


Nah.

People read fiction because they want to escape reality.

I go far the opposite of curing society and let my characters run amuck. They swear, they use the N-word, they are often racist, one of them preaches purity of blood, rape and murder happens on the page - not faded to black or talked about after the fact and it's the 3 MCs who are doing the rape and murder. It's in your face and not only steps on sensitive snowflake toes, it smashes the sensitive snowflakes out the window - literally - one novel in the series, they storm a publishing house and murder all the sensitivity beta readers with teddy bear soldiers (yes, I DID publish that in 2014 a couple of weeks after the infamous Teddy Bear meltdown that introduced sensitivity readers to the world)

I don't sell out on the things that are important to me just because they are "too political" for whining crybabies, I mean sensitive snowflakes.

I was the editor in chief of 2 magazines for 16 years, and you want to know what that job taught me? This: The professional publishing industry is a dog eat dog career of climb to the top and crush everyone in your way to get there, and that ladder is built on a foundation of crushed snowflakes.

Social justice warriors scream for diverse books, but readers, they just want a good story. How many SJW actually READ books? Not many. They don't know readers want. 

PC activists demand pushing minority characters to the top, while at the same time demanding every one write their own race. But only 12% of America is minority race and that's combining ALL minority races together, the fact remains, there are not enough minority writers to rely on them to write enough minority characters to meet the demands of PC activists, who don't speak for readers. Few readers care what race the characters are. Most readers say race is so unimportant to most stories, that the characters are better left with no race mentioned so the reader can self insert their own race.

I am myself a "person of colour" though I dislike that term, because it segregates me as being too different to be accepted as just a part of the human race. PoC is a label and I dislike labels. Whatever happen to we are all human and embracing multiculturalism? But do you know, even though I write my characters as the same race as me, readers still get mad.

Why?

It would take all day to make a complete list. Every one has a bone pick. A common one though is the lecherous character, BoomFuzzy, I'll speak more of in a minute.

To put it simply: he black, he has bum length dreadlocks, he's a gang leader, he makes and sells drugs, he's lewd, he's crude, he's vulgar, his dialogue is written in a broken English accent, he's violent, he's an abuser, he's a rapist, he's a murderer, he practices Voodoo, and he's gay. Yeah. Pretty much EVERYTHING that the SJW say you SHOULD NOT write a black man as, I've written him as, and has done so for 43 years now. He's not a new character, and he's only a few years from the 50th anniversary of his creation. 

He is both the most hated and the most loved character I write. Fans adore him and want more of him. Haters, well, haters hate, and they hate him most of all.

There are people who demand I change him, because he's everything you "should not" write about a black man. But... he's the same race as me, he speak the same accept and broken English as me, I grew up in what most people would call "slums" around gangs, my uncles made drugs, sold drugs, and well, it doesn't much research to find out what gang my uncles are the leaders of, there are literally thousands of TV and newspaper news reports, prison records, I'm a Voodoo Priestess a religion that has been in our family since the 1640s, all the men in our clan our violent, I have 2 uncles and 14 cousins all in prison for rape. Gang wars, drive by shootings, those were a daily part of my childhood. 

Yeah.

I grew with bad people.

It's not a secret.

But you know what... I write what I know.

I grew up in a counter culture that most mainstream white Americans, couldn't even begin to comprehend or even imagine that it existed. And I write that culture, that lifestyle, simply because, it's what I know.

I'm not going to sugar coat what slum lord gang life is like.

It's brutal.

It's violent.

Most children get their first gun for their 8th birthday and are proficient at using in in less than a year.

Most children will witness at least one murder before they are 10.

Most children are selling drugs on the street before they are 12.

Most girls are prostitutes before they are 14.

Most will be hurt or killed by a drive by shooting before they are 18.

That's the reality of the "American underground counter culture" that I was raised in and that the publishing industry would rather never appeared in novels, because they want sweep it under the rug and pretend it doesn't exist because they want to show every minority as a glowing saint.

 Well guess what, your skin colour doesn't determine if you are bad or good. Good exists in every race. And bad exists in every race as well. And if we minorities write characters of our race as glowing saints who do no wrong, than we are part of the problem.

People turn a blind eye to the criminal underground of America. But I grew up in that criminal underground. I was 8 years old, when a 10 year old boy, my cousin, standing right beside me, got a bullet in his eye and out the back of his head. And that's the type thing children see every day. But no one talks about it, because it's too political.

While I trade publish other book, I HAVE to self publish this series, because no publisher will touch it. They treat it like it's the plague. "You can't write stuff like that" they say. "People want happy thoughts!" 

Well, you know what, I'm a writer who writes what I know, and I know the criminal gang underground of America, very, very, very well. And I don't care how many social justice warriors want to scream that you have to write all minorities as good, never villains, never gangsters, never rapists, no, no, no, no, no! You might step on some toes!

Well, maybe it's time someone started stepping on toes.

The problem with the people who scream the loudest, is they are also the people who read the least, so they do not represent what actual readers, actually want.

And those white people out screaming for minority rights and diversity in books, they don't know what it is like to live with boards nailed over your windows praying the boards are thick enough to keep bullets out so you don't get shot by a drive by in your sleep. They don't know what it is like to be an 8 year old girl and sleep on a pile of hay, not a bed, and be dragged out of that by an uncle who needs money for drugs, so he brought a wealthy priest over from the church to rape you, because the priest is willing to pay a lot of money to do so.

Those SJWs marching around with their signs and screaming for diversity and accurate representation in books, they haven't got a clue. Because after they get done marching with their signs, they go sleep in a warm, dry bed, and nice big house, and they don't have to worry about being shot to death in their sleep or dragged out of bed to be raped by one of your uncles' friends from church.

They don't want REAL diversity in books, they don't want REAL representation of minorities and minority culture... they want familiar white upper class neighbourhood with a few token minorities so they can pat themselves on the back and think they did a good deed by putting a coloured person in a rich white person setting.

Well guess what? I write what I know.

I write my characters the same race as me, and living the same lifestyle and culture I grew up with, and if SJWs don't like that, well, I think they need to rethink their so-called morals ad the their motives behind why they want sensitivity in books. 

>>>In my own work I have made several characters that are not particularly moral people. That’s not uncommon but in the process, I ran into a problem, and I wanted some other opinion on it.


Same. All 3 of my MCs fall into the classification of being supervillains, but none of them sees themselves as evil.

MC1 -Quaraun- sees himself as doing good. If he sees a pregnant woman being beating up by her husband/boyfriend, he won't think twice about about rescuing the girl and her unborn baby, by splattering the abuser's head all over the sidewalk. If he sees a gang of bullies picking on a kid, even if the bullies are themselves children, he'll grab the victim and obliterate the bullies - yes murder them. He is a serial killer and he has killed thousands of people. He doesn't hide what heroes, he openly admits it, by stating outright: "Never suffer a bully to live, kill them all". He was bullied, horrifically as a child and was too weak and sickly to fight back, one day a friend stood up to the bullies and was killed. Guilt drove him to kill those bullies years later, but he didn't stop with them and devoted his like to eliminating all bullies from the world. But he has morals. He never kills any one who is innocent, and he's quite proud of his high moral standard of only killing people who deserved to die. In spite of his belief in his own high moral standards, he drinks absinthe with LSD laced sugar cubes, while smoking opium from a hookah. He is often too high, too dazed, or too drunk to be fully in control of his mental faculties.

MC2 -BoomFuzzy- was abused as a child and blames that for everything; he started his life of crime young, by killing and eating his father. A lewd, crude, vulgar, sex crazed pervert, he thinks nothing of blowing up an entire town and killing everyone if some brat child threw a rock at him. By far the most violent of the 3 he openly admits it is difficult for him to empathise with others and that people are easy to kill because he spent his live unloved and unwanted by everyone and so everyone could die and he wouldn't care. A drug making pastry chef, he is not beyond drugging someone's food so he can rape them and he frequently does exactly that, often making drugged chocolates and giving them to people. If he drugged you so he could rape you, he's likely going to kill you, and cook you in the next meal he makes for his next victim. 

MC3 -GhoulSpawn- sees himself as having very high moral standards and there are many things he would never do. For example, he's never killed anyone, nor would he. But he has a coat lined with hundreds of pockets, each pocket is actually a bag of holding, and hell steal anything that's not nailed down, for no reason at all. It doesn't have to be anything of value, he just can't resists taking anything left sitting unattended. A portal master who can change time, he became addicted to changing history, just because he could. He causes the end of the world, and he could go back in time to undo what he did, but the addiction to making things progressively worse, instead sends him ever back in time, to see how much worse he can make things become.

I don't believe in groveling to "politically correct sensitive snowflake terrorism". By my mind, far too many authors are being pulled around by their balls, by social justice warriors and it's stifling creativity and causes an onslaught of bland, flavorless books being published because authors are to scared of being castrated by SJWs to write how they feel any more.

>>>Let’s use the example of a character who is lecherous.


In reading your examples, I'm not sure you know what the word lecherous means. It's A LOT more than comments, jokes, and whistles.

A lecherous person will grope boobs, squeeze balls, slaps bottoms, dry hump strangers... and one of my 3 MCs does exactly that all the time. He's lewd, he's vulgar, he thinks nothing of grouping strangers, and it doesn't matter how other characters respond, he just keeps doing it.

He'll get punched out by siblings/parents/partners of the person he's sexually harassing and he'll just turn around and punch them right back. And he probably won't stop punching them until he's driven his fist through their face and out the back of their skull - he's done exactly that in several scenes in several novels of the series.

BoomFuzzy is evil. Very, very evil. And he don't take shit from no one.

>>>Can they be a main character who is unquestionably the hero?


The series have a primary main character and 2 secondary main characters. He is one of the secondary. But he is NOT represented as a "hero" and not an "anti-hero" either. In fact all 3 of them are villains.

The story is told from the perspective of three undefeatable super villains, who are now elderly/senior citizens and have slaughtered every single hero and/or adventuring party who ever tried to stop them. They didn't know each other in youth, meeting after they got too old to keep being super villains. 

>>>Do they have to correct their flaw or even have it challenged?


The sex-crazed lecher is one of the above mentioned main character trio. BoomFuzzy has been a lustful, lecherous pervert his entire life, and he has no plans of stopping. And I've no plans to ever write him even trying to stop. This is who he is.

The same can be said for the other 2 MCs.

I don't pussy foot around with my villains.

They ain't Disney villains.

They are not going to change. They won't try to redeem themselves, and they'll continue to kill the heroes who try to stop or redeem them. They'll continue to rape, kill, steal, and destroy the world. It's who they are.

I should probably point out, the genre is SplatterPunk Gorn, set in a Fantasy world. It's grizzly, it's graphic, there are bookstores that won't carry my books, most people don't have the stomach for what I write.

>>>Should it impact the story and if so how? Is it fine to just have them be slapped comedically for their comments? Should it be treated with gritty realistic drama, as their female coworker has them fired. Should they be struck by lightning every time they wolf whistle?


It does.

His absolute inability to keep his hands to himself gets the trio in trouble all the time. While it's never been a primary plot to any of the novels, it is definitely an underlying "thread" that runs through the entire series and is seen prominently in every story.

How it gets treated depends on the situation, the characters he's with, the culture of the locals there at the time, etc.

It usually leans towards the gritty realism, with him often getting into fist fights, bar room brawls, etc. And the trio being wizards, should his actions cause trouble for the MC - Quaraun.

Quaraun WILL hit him with lightening bolts, that has actually happened quite a few times.

Though, MC Quaraun, doesn't toss spells at the lecher because he's a lecher, it'll be for something like, the lecher and the victim's boyfriend where fighting and landed on his table, knocking his food on the floor, so he zapped them both for knocking over the table and couldn't care less about the lecher stopping his lecherous actions.

This is true for each MC. They are 3 men with violent tempers, bitter pasts, and come hell or high water attitudes. 

>>>My instinct is to say that the audience can decide for themselves how they feel about a character’s behavior without me explicitly telling them or implicitly having karma punish them. But this is a subjective issue and I would like some of your feedback.

>>>How much should I as the author dictate to the audience whether a character is good or bad?


Well I don't know about other authors, but, I'm not the reader's baby sitter. There are 27 countries that require my books to be sold under a M21+ rating. If the reader is old enough to even BUY one of my books, and my books are sold in stores that require an ID card to even get into the store, than they are old enough to not need a babysitter or a gatekeeper to tell them what they can and can't read. 

My readers are adults, they don't need to be spoon fed baby food, so I don't hold back in writing. 

If someone gets upset or offended by what I write, that's on them, not me. It's a THEM problem, not a me problem. I'm not going to censor myself just to powder their soiled diaper.

If they ain't mature enough to react or behave civilly after reading one of my books, then they weren't mature enough to buy the book to begin with.

It's not my job to preach a message of morals - right or wrong - be good or else - to my readers. My job is simply to tell a story. SJWs want us authors to run around whipping the snot out of every readers' nose and changing every readers' diapers, because heaven forbid we write something that might offend anyone and make them cry, or worse make them think. Heaven forbid free will exists, in a world of self righteous morals that show only the world through rose coloured glasses and sweep everything the SJWs want forget under the rug. 

The world is fast becoming a place where nothing starry eyes happy go lucky white characters wearing colored skin becomes the norm in publishing. 


  • Minority characters with high end 9 to 5 jobs? That's not the real world. That fantasy exists only in "diverse novels".

  • Minority characters driving new cars and wearing high society fashions? Oh please! That's not the real world. That fantasy exists only in "diverse novels".

  • Minority characters who live in suburbia, never dealt drugs, never were part of gangs? That's not the real world. That fantasy exists only in "diverse novels".

  • Minority characters with insert something only found in wealthy white culture here, like SmartPhones? That's not the real world. That fantasy exists only in "diverse novels".

Seems to me that the more diverse novels claim to be, the less diverse they actually are.

Books that are supposedly diverse are the most dull, drab, cookie cutter, unimaginative drivel out there. Characters have no personality, no background, no history, nothing to connect them with the real world.

Authors check off the boxes in their diversity checklist:

"Now, I added the token gay friend and the token black friend and the token smart Asian kid and the token strong girl and now all I need is the token Middle Eastern kid and my book is ready to publish! Yay! Now I changed this white character into the token black boy and I changed that big bully who beats everyone up into a girl, which why character can I change into the Middle eastern boy? Oh wait, my list says I need a Native American and and East Indian as well now? But I don't have that many characters! Damn. I'm going to have to write in 2 more white kid and change their nationality before publication. Now where can I add 2 more characters? Gotta be diverse, you know."

It's become ridiculous.

Authors are no longer allowed to just write their story.

White authors are belittled and made to feel bad if they don't add characters of colour, because "it's all white power, if you are not diverse, blah, blah, blah". So, they add colored characters because they were told they had too. And than, those same white authors are mad to feel bad if they DO add characters of colour! Because "Oh, you don't know what it's like to be me, only someone of my colour can write my color."

Oh boo-hoo!

Do you have life experience in being an Elf? Or a wizard? Or a Dwarf? Or a Medieval Knight? No! And you don't need it because you have imagination!

Diverse novels are nothing but blackface: white characters, living white lives, working white jobs, having white friends, enjoying the privilege of white culture, not knowing the slums, not knowing the gangs, but described as Black, Asian, Native American, Gypsy, Irish... for no other reason than to satisfy white readers' need to feel like they've been inclusive and they call it diverse, because it has coloured faces slapped onto obviously white characters, living white culture.

But than, try being a minority person of colour writer and write/show a minority character, living ACTUAL REAL WORLD minority lifestyle, show the drug dealers, show the rapists, show the gangs, show the prostitutes, show the homeless, show the starving children, and the SJWs come out of the woodwork screaming, "Those are bad stereotypes, you can't write that it makes minorities look bad! We have to make minorities look good! Shame on your for writing your own race the way your people actually live!"

No matter what you do, you can't win with these people.


* Whites can't write white characters that's all white power if they do.

* Whites can't write coloured characters because that's all colonialism if they do.

* Colours can't write white characters because they are doing an injustice to their race by not writing characters the same as them.

* Colours can't write their own race/culture as it actually is because who their people are in the real world is too offensive.


  • Whites can't write whites.
  • Coloured can't write whites.
  • Whites can't write coloured.
  • Coloured can't write coloured.
  • Straights MUST write gays.
  • Straight CAN'T write gays.
  • Women can't write men.
  • Men can't write women.

Well what else is left? Are we supposed to just write metal robots. 

At this rate, no one will be able to write ANY ONE without Twitter's cancel culture calling out for the total destruction o their career. We'll all be forced to write metal robot characters, but hey, computer rights activists will rise up and we won't even be able to write those.

Is our society now iRobot? Is that really what our world has become?

Or is it Lord of the Flies? A world ruled by children, after they killed all the adults? A world where 10 year olds run to Twitter and control EVERRYTHING because EVERYONE business, politicians, governments, publishing houses, authors are all too scared of 10 year old children cancelling them on Twitter, to be who they really are, to say what they really feel.

10 years on Twitter rule the world today, We ARE living in Lord of the Flies. That's what our world is today. A world where 7 billion adults are lead around by a ring through their noses, by 8 million 10 year old children on social media. The adult masses bow and scrap to the children of Twitter.



>>>How clear does an author have to be about the morals of their characters? 


Maybe we should reword the question to something like this:

**How many self righteous asses does an author have to kiss when creating their characters?**

Are we the brown nose society groveling in the shit of the masters? Or are we free people with free will and free minds of our own to think for ourselves? 


>>>We live in an era of heightened moral sensitivity. 


No.

Actually we don't. 

  • * Divorce rate is at it's highest ever in history.

  • * In 2019, there were 57k (fifty seven thousand) streamer girls under the age of 18, were raped by a man who sent them money via Twitch 

  • * 9,000 babies are murdered by their mothers every day JUST in America

  • * 98% of all couples live together, as marriage rates plummet to their lowest in history

  • * as of June 2021, more than 20,000 (twenty thousand) people have died this year, by drive by or mass shootings, the highest of any year in history

  • * just last month, one month, saw 7 million gun sales, in just one state - one state, one month - the highest amount of gun sales ever

  • * so far in 2021, not even 6 months into 1 year, in America there have been TWICE as many murders of gay, lesbian, and trans people, as there were in the entire of the 1970s - more in 6 month, than in 10 years

  • * crimes against Asians are at their highest since 1849

  • * car jackings have tripled, in the last 6 months

  • * in America, there were more riots in just one year 2020, than there were in the entire of the 1900s - more in 1 year, than in 100 years

  • * right now, in Maine, in 2021, just one state in America, an average of 12 children die each day from starvation - a rate per capita that is 70% HIGHER than how many children die from starvation each day in Africa

If our moral sensitivities were ACTUALLY higher, those numbers would be at the lowest in history, not their highest.

People screaming they want squeaky clean morals in books, are full of shit if they think they have high morals. They are hypocrites. They don't have high morals, they just want to not see reality. They have the lowest morals of all, because they want to bury reality, not fix.

A person with high morals, seeks to help the starving homeless gangster minority children in their town, not pretend they don't exist.

People who claim they have high morals, really don't. They just want fluffy bunnies and bright coloured rainbows, gumdrops and lemon pops, to make themselves feel good as they walk over the homeless on their street.

They want white-washed minorities in their white washed diversity novels so they can feel good when the starving children on their streets get murdered in the crossfire of a gangster drive by. "Oh well, so little child died, but at least I wrote a coloured rich kid in my novel".


>>>We live in an era of heightened moral sensitivity. 


No we don't.

This era has fewer morals than any era before it.

What we live in is a society that wants to sweep everything under the rug and pretend the world is all kittens and roses.

They may have a heightened sensitivity to seeing reality, but they have have the lowest morals in history of mankind, because rather than MAKE actual changes, they just want to toss a white blanket over everything and pretend there is nothing underneath.

THAT is WHY they scream for us authors to NOT show the bad side of anything.

THAT is WHY they want all our characters in all of our novels to be written squeaky clean.

They don't actually want morally good characters, they just don't want to be reminded of reality. They want to hide reality so they don't to think about it. They want reality to not be there so they can sleep at night. They want the world to change, but they don't want to BE the change, so they demand we authors write the changed world THEY want so they don't have to bother BEING the change they want to see.

They want us authors to do the work of changing the world for them, in our fictional novels, so that they can pretend the real world is changed and they didn't have to lift a figure to change it. 

They want to sit on Twitter ordering us authors around, but they are too lazy to get off their asses and put into action, those high morals they supposedly have.

Authors like me, we bother them, because we give our characters REAL flaws, that our culture ACTUALLY has in the REAL world. And they don't like that. They want minority characters to be the way they THINK minority people SHOULD be. They don't want to see minority characters AS THEY REALLY ARE.

YES. I write black character, with bum length dreadlocks, who is a gang leader, and he makes and sells drugs, he's lewd, he's crude, he's vulgar, his dialogue is written in a broken English accent, he's violent, he's an abuser, he's a rapist, he's a murderer, he practices Voodoo, and he's gay. Yeah. Pretty much EVERYTHING that the SJW say you SHOULD NOT write a black man as, I've written him as, and has done so for 43 years now. He's not a new character, and he's only a few years from the 50th anniversary of his creation. 

But guess what?

I'm not white.

My dreadlocks are 42" long.

I speak "broken English", my language in every day conversation is crude and vulgar.

I'm a Voodoo priestess.

I grew up in a gang.

I was and still am right now, a gang leader.

I require a body guard to go with me to do my shopping at WalMart.

I was homeless and living under an 8x6' tarp for 9 years.

My uncles were drug dealers.

My cousins were prostitutes.

2 of my cousins are waitresses in topless bars.

I've seen more than 30 friends and family gunned down in drive by shootings.

This is the life I grew up in.

Maybe it is a stereotype to write minority races living in crime infested slums, but you know what, it's a stereotype, because us real world minorities, we really do live in crime infested slums.

I'm sorry if the social justice warriors of Twitter's cancel culture, don't want to see characters like that because they have heightened moral sensitivity, but guess what, I can't change how me and millions of other minorities grew up, and I'll certainly not pretend it never happened, sweep it under a rug, and write my minority characters living in some tuttie-fruttie white suburbia that no real world minority lives in, doing charity work that no real world minority does, driving fancy cars no real world minority can afford, working jobs no real world minority can get, no matter how many SJWs scream of the need for morals and sensitivity.

Life ain't pretty. So why should our novels be? Why should we pretend our fictional characters are any different from their real world counterparts?

You know what, if they can't stomach the reality of how real minority children grow up in the real world, and think it's better to turn a blind eye to that lifestyle and pretend it doesn't exist, well than maybe they ought to rethink being warriors of social justice, because while they are preaching morals, they certainly ain't practicing what they preach, and they definitely have no clue what either the words social or justice mean.

Fact remains, I'm no one nurse maid. If readers want to piss their pants over how offended they are, they can do that, but if they expect anything they say/demand to change how I write my characters, well they can just burn in Hell.

>>>How clear does an author have to be about the morals of their characters?


As clear as mud if they want to be.


>>>We live in an era of heightened moral sensitivity. There is great concern about fixing the many social ills of the world and one of the chief areas of this is in fiction.


We live in a sad era where it's seen as bad to write the horrible truth.

We live in a sad era where it's seen as good to write the pretty lie.

Everyone wants to see the great and powerful wizard of Oz, but no one wants to see the little man behind the curtain who pulls all the strings.


>>>How much should I as the author dictate to the audience whether a character is good or bad?


None.

Nothing.

You're not their mother.

It's not your job to teach your readers right from wrong, good from bad.


>>>Let’s use the example of a character who is lecherous. Can they be a main character who is unquestionably the hero?


Yes, they can.

The only reason you don't see that sort of thing more often, is because authors are scared of backlash. A well justified fear, unfortunately. The 10 year old children of Twitter CAN destroy an author's career in a matter of minutes, with just one Tweet, if that Tweet goes viral.

Sad reality is, a lot of authors are living pay check to paycheck, working part time jobs to make ends meet, and every penny counts. And while their book money may not be much, losing that income, may be just enough to make them homeless, put their children on the streets. So they can't risk pissing off the 10 year old children of Twitter. For a lot of authors, it really is a matter of life and death, to write squeaky clean, step on no toes characters, or write write the truth of cultures as they are. They can't risk their children living in a car in some dark alley, so they can't risk writing the world as it is.

If there was less threat of 10 year old white privileged children, using their $2,000 SmartPhones to condemn poor minority children to homelessness, via the high and mighty silver spoons of Twitter, you'd see more minority authors writing more accurate to real world minority characters.

>>>Do they have to correct their flaw or even have it challenged?


No.

They don't.

And the 10 year old children of Twitter aren't our peers, so why do so many authors feel the need to bow and scrap before the snobby brat children of rich white men? Tell me that.

Twitter is Lord of the Flies brought to life. And anyone who bows to the whims of cancel society is a fool.

If you've never read it, read Lord of the Flies, than look at Twitter's cancel culture with new eyes and you'll see how utterly foolish people are to let children control the world through social media.


>>>Should it impact the story and if so how?


If your name is not Aesop, that you got no reason to put moral lessons in your story. 

It's YOUR story, write it YOUR way. 

If you WANT your story to teach a moral lesson, that's fine. Go ahead and write it that way. Nothing wrong with that at all.

But if you are ONLY adding a moral lesson because you feel like you'll get attacked by Twitter cancel culture, than, are you REALLY teaching any moral lessons at all?

I mean think about it. When you tuck your tail between your legs and write moral lessons ONLY out of the fear of backlash, the only lesson you are teaching anyone is how to be a castrated coward with no balls.

If you don't stand for something, you're going to fall for anything, and once you fall, the SJWs are just going to run right over you and trample you into the mud.

SJWs and Twitter's cancel culture, are power hungry. They don't care about high morals. They only care that they can get the world to grovel at their feet.

If you are happy to grovel at the feet of tyrants, well than you go right ahead and do that. Me? I'd rather stand on my own two feet. I'd rather my morals, actually be MY morals and not morals that some tyrant forced me to pretend I have.

Any dead fish can float with the flow, it takes a live fish to swim against what is popular, swim upstream and stand up for what is ACTUALLY right, but not necessity popular.

Maybe my morals are different from the morals of Twitter. Maybe some of Twitter's morals aren't so very moral at all and I don't want any part of their hypocrisy. Maybe, I think the 9,000 daily baby murders are crimes and those so called liberal mothers are nothing but cold hearted murders who deserve the death penalty just like every other child murderer. Maybe, I see the high polluting morals of Twitter, as an utter, absolute lack of morality masked as high morals.

Maybe, my characters aren't perfect, but you know what? Neither am I. 

I'm not perfect, so why should I write a perfect character?


My culture, my race, my people, they get stereotyped as criminals, but you know what, maybe there's a reason for that, maybe it's because they ARE criminals. 

Maybe it's bad to write my race, my culture, my people as slum lords, thugs, drug dealers, and gangsters, but you know, maybe it's just as ad to hide the reality of the fact that REAL people in my race ARE in fact slum lords, thugs, drug dealers, and gangsters. 

Maybe, if my people, my culture,, my race really WANTED to be seen as good character in novels, maybe they should try to be good people in REAL life. Because guess what?

I write from experience and I experienced far more bad than good, in my culture, I saw more people growing up, than I saw good people.

Maybe if they wanted us writers to write them in a good light, maybe, they should look in the mirror and see themselves the way I saw them, through the eyes of a terrified child, who knew no safety, no love, spent every day of my childhood in fear of being shot, was raped weekly, sometimes daily -from the time I was 4 years old til the time I was 17 years old- by my uncle's drug dealing gangster friends.

Maybe, if they REALLY wanted to be presented as good people in fiction, maybe they should try being good people in real life.

I give my characters real world flaws, and I make them real world unrepentant, feeling no guilt for what they do, and getting away with it, walking free for murder, rape, vandalism, thievery, drugs, gang wars, drive bys, just like they do in the real world.  

My advice to my fellow writers is this:

Write the book YOU want to read.

Write the characters YOU want to read.

Tell YOUR story, about YOUR characters, YOUR way. 

To hell with the sensitive snowflake social justice warriors and their fake morals.

Fact is, I got tired of seeing my race, my culture, my people portrayed as lovely dovey, commit no evil, do no wrong, live suburbia acting like white people painted dark, when the reality is, my people are not like that.

I write my characters as my own race, my own culture, and make them just as dark, bad, evil, unremorseful, and unrepentant as they are in real life.

Leopards don't change their spots.

Men like my uncles, they don't change their ways because some goody-two-shoes came along and preached at them.

No.

If a novel-type hero went up to my uncles and told them "what you doing is bad, join us in the fight for right and good" my uncles would pullout a gun, and blow the hero's face off before he even had time to finish monologuing his good guy exposition, and than they would toss his body in the nearby ravine, where it's be eaten by catfish and lobsters. They are not going to change. They keep going to prison, and when they get back out, they go right back to their crimes every time. 

Real world evil men like my uncles do not repent and change their ways. So why should my fictional characters based off of them act any different?

Stay true to the type person your character is.

If he's a jack ass dick, than you write him as a jackass dick.

If he's not redeemable, than don't write him as redeemable.

It's YOUR character, in YOUR story. Write him whatever way YOU want him.


**Give your characters flaws and lack of morals, no respect for decency, no desire to change, no one challenging them to change, and make no apologies for it. If readers don't like it, that's their problem not yours.**

As Ricky Nelson said: "You can't please everyone, so you might as well please yourself."

>>>(P.S. While I understand that this topic touches upon personal philosophy and perhaps even politics, I hope that we can discuss this civilly in the common understanding that we are all only trying to create good art.)

And, here is the original article, from 2017:

Character Flaws and Goals

Character Flaws and Goals

Discussion in 'Character Development' started by Chrisso, Oct 24, 2017.

Hi there, I'm a new writer and am seeking some advice in relation to developing a character for a screenplay I'm attempting to write, specifically regarding flaws and their relation to a character's pursuit of their goal in a story.

A lot of the advice I've read about developing the protagonist character stress that you need to determine what his/her flaw and main goals are, and that their flaw should be something that he/she needs to overcome in order to achieve that goal. 

My question is, what if the main hindrance to the protagonist's pursuit of his/her goal is actually completely external, and unrelated to any of his/her character flaws? Would you still create flaws for that character, and let them overcome those flaws throughout their character arc (or not), while he/she is simultaneously attempt to pursue their goal? Or would they not be required?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

As I'm reading this, I'm trying to recall if I've ever consciously gone out of my way to add flaws to any of my characters. I published my first book in 1978 and have since gone on to have 130+ novels, 2,000+ short stories, and a few dozen stage plays, and I don't think in any of them, I can recall ever having sat down to create a character and thought: "Now it's time to add some flaws."

This is a rather interesting thought now, because I have heard people give that advice, but I've always just brushed it aside and kept on going elsewhere.

Now, it's not like my characters are not flawed. I've had main characters who were drunks, murderers, rapists, drug dealers, cultists, you name it, if it's a major character flaw, I've probably used it at some point.

My current series, the main character is a suicidal drug addict and his lover a chemist/drug dealer.

Both of them are on the run from the law - the main character for murdering his wife and four children and his lover for multiple rapes.

One is suicidally depressed and has a lower than low self esteem, the other is a bully and gets a kick out of starting brawls. They both have drinking problems. If I was to sit down and make a list of their flaws, it'd probably take me all week. By all logic they should be villains or bad guys or something evil and not the main characters, because these two guys got flaws out the wazoo! They may perhaps be too flawed. LOL!

But the thing is, when I created them, I didn't go into it looking to build flawed characters.

There was no: "What flaws should I give them?" moment.

The idea for them came from a couple I knew in real life, both had "bad" pasts and were trying to rebuild their lives, but society couldn't look past their flawed past. They started a dollar store together but found it difficult to gain customers. One day only one of them was at the store and he told us his partner was dead. His depression sunk lower for weeks, until one day the store was closed. We never saw him again and soon found out he'd commit suicide. I did not know either of them very well, and apparently was one of the few friends they had, and looking back wished I could have gotten to know them better. As the years went by, I always had this "What if?" in my head.

I ended up taking that event and creating a couple, both with a bad past, both looking to start over, both struggling with the way society treated them, both only having each other. While they are vastly different from the real men that had inspired them, their creation was not built around their flaws, but rather around their desire to start a new life and the prejudices they met up with because of their passed. The idea fascinated me, of, how someone can do a terrible thing, go to prison, then years later try to start life over, but never fully be given the second chance to do so, because no matter where they go people are quick to judge.

Think about it: You have a guy, a murderer no less, who's now years later, trying to find a way to become a member of society. But everywhere he turns, he's meet with bitterness and hate. He's chased out of one town after another, unable to settle down and start a new life, because the bigotry against him is so great. He's beaten up and bullied time and again. The only person he can turn to is yet another man, who is going through the same thing.

They are both outcasts of society. Both unloved and unwanted everywhere they go. And as the series goes on they meet a third man facing the same thing, and the couple becomes a trio.

The world judges them for their flaws. 

The world can not see past their sins, to see the person behind the crimes.

The world can not fathom that they may truelt be sorry for what they've done and actually are seeking to start a new life.

No.

The world sees only the flaws.

The flaws become the story.

The world becomes the enemy.

These men are overshadowed by flaws from their past that haunt them.

But then, with characters so deeply flawed as these men are, the goal in creating them, becomes not looking for flaws to add to them, but rather the opposite: looking for the good in them, to let the good shine through.

And so while the two characters are deeply flawed, the reader sees the story from their point of view, and thus the reader sees the other side of them as well - the hopes, the dreams, the guilt, the pain, the desire to become better, the self doubt,... instead of being two horribly flawed characters, they now become fully developed characters, fleshed out with a lot of good along side the bad.

These men know they have committed terrible crimes. They openly admit what they've done. But they are begging for someone, anyone, to look past what they did and see them as a person, an equal, someone who has feelings, and feels sorrow, guilt, and regret.

Each of these men desperately desires to be loved and accepted. They want to be part of the community again. They want people to know they are still people inside and not the cold heartless monsters the media has made them out to be.

The thing that pushes the story forward is their desire to start over and live a better life, but the thing that constantly prevents them from reaching that goal is the prejudice they meet in every new town they try to settle down in.

So, I think this is an example of the sort of thing you are looking for, but, it's something that just naturally evolved as I was plotting out the story. It wasn't me thinkng: "Let's add this flaw and that flaw". It was just, "this is who he is and this is how people react to him, which results in this happening to trip iup his plans for the future."

Does that make sense?

In the end, in the actual story, you don't see their flaws really out on display, because I like to tell very emotional, character driven stories with characters doing lots of introspective, thinking, monologuing, lots of inner turmoil, and dialogue. The reader ends up not seeing the flaws that much, because the reader is in the character's head and sees the world as he sees it, rather then seeing the character as the world sees him.

I think, focusing on character emotion, really getting inside the character and viewing his world the way his does, is far better then trying to put flaws on a character. Emotions draw the reader into the character and help the reader to see what his hopes and dreams and goals for his future are, whereas flaws just tell the reader, yeah, this guy has this in his way, and doesn't really grab the reader's heart and pull them into the character's story.








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