Flaw

‘When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them. You’re meeting their representative.’ This joke from Chris Rock was about why relationships are hard to maintain, but it also explains how three-dimensional characters work. We all send a representative out into the world. We all use façades to help people see us the way we’d like to be seen. So should your protagonist.

Two-dimensional characters like James Bond only have a want. He is pure desire, and that’s why he never changes. Three-dimensional characters have a want and a need.

That hole is the flaw, and it’s there before the story even begins. What a character wants, in almost every great story, stands in direct opposition to what they need.

The want serves the flaw. Gatsby wants wealth to bury his poverty. Lightning McQueen wants trophies to feed his arrogance. Fully realised characters have a façade, built from traits they believe protect them, and the façade is usually what causes the problem.

One flaw can wear a thousand masks. The critic Kenneth Tynan defined a neurosis as ‘a secret you don’t know you’re keeping’, and that’s exactly what a flaw is.

Witness, The Searchers and Notting Hill all star men terrified of intimacy, and they’re three utterly different men. Give five characters the same fear and you get five different people.

This is where storytelling and psychology turn out to be the same subject. Freud saw a war between the rule-abiding Superego and the desire-driven Id. Jung called the two sides the persona and the shadow: the self we perform, and the one underneath. And every theory lands on the same definition of health: the two sides must be integrated.

The best characters let us glimpse both layers at once. A soap actress once described her character’s trademark grin perfectly: ‘It’s not a smile, it’s a lid on a scream.’ Walter White is a gentle chemistry teacher with Scarface underneath. And superheroes have built an empire by making the split literal: mild, powerless Clark Kent on the outside, a god within. Is there any better invitation for an audience that feels ordinary and dreams of being more?

There’s a shortcut for designing all of this. Ask one question: what does my protagonist most fear? Flaw and fear are the same thing seen from different angles.

If your story is a dark inversion, the flaw doesn’t have to be a weakness. Michael Corleone’s flaw in The Godfather is his love for his family, a good quality that corrodes into something terrible. A flaw at the beginning of a story produces its opposite at the end. Bad will become good; good will become bad. That’s the recipe for every cautionary tale ever told.