Look around your room right now and try to find something wrong. For example, there might be dirty clothes piled all over the floor. Maybe there are several wedges of half-eaten cheese on different tables in the room. Perhaps there are painful cysts growing in your armpits which your doctor says is likely caused by over-consumption of old cheese. If YouTube analytics is to be believed, all of these things are true.

You might think I’m a psychic. But actually I’m just a writer who, through years of hard work, taught himself to be perceptive of character flaws, in fiction and in real life. And while that didn’t stop me from marrying a woman who turned out to be a serial bigamist, it did teach me to write many complex heroes with compelling characterization. We’ll explore how to exploit our worst personal demons to earn a few bucks on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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No one is perfect. For writers with large egos, sometimes this can be hard to remember. Hell, as a man who was first published at 25, sports a full head of hair at 52 and has erections that last three hours and fifty-nine minutes, sometimes it’s hard for me to think of any personal flaws. But trust me, I’ve got plenty. For example, as I’m writing this article, I happen to be twirling a loaded pistol.

In any case, it’s flaws that give your characters depth, that make them relatable and memorable. But it’s important to remember that flaws are always internal, never external. So having an alcoholic mother or living in Ohio aren’t flaws, depressing as they may be. We’ll start by looking at different kinds of flaws and analyze some classic examples from fiction.

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Minor Flaws

For starters, we have minor flaws. These are often unique or memorable, but don’t have any real impact on your narrative. Indiana Jones’s fear of snakes is a classic example of a fun, humanizing flaw. In my revenge novel set in Georgian England, Bride of Prejudice, Leeandra has a hideous scar that runs from her right temple to her left tit. It’s a unique character trait but doesn’t really affect her or her arc in any way.

Major Flaws

Then, we have major flaws. These are catalysts for action and they drive the story. For Holden Caulfield, it’s his self-pride and inability to cope with his trauma that sets him at odds with everyone in the story. For Kable Anderken in Blake Colby’s Blood Shot, it the memories of missing free throws to get an 8th seed in the playoffs that haunt him.

Fatal Flaws

Then, we have the fatal flaw. These either make or break the character. For the hero, the whole story might be about overcoming this flaw and for the villain, it’s often their downfall. Ahab’s obsession for revenge and Humbert Humbert’s pedophilia are classic examples here. And in the sitcom, Heil Honey, I’m Home, it’s Hitler’s lack of social graces that ruin the dinner party.

Now let’s look at some ways to construct our own character flaws.

Step One: Create Relatable Flaws

If you want your reader to connect with your character, there’s nothing better than making them relatable. Think of common flaws that most people have. Maybe your character masturbates 10 times a day.  Or maybe they’re bad with money, spending half their income on antique guns.

In one of my early stories, Zero Point Infinity, one of the characters constantly tries to kill himself but is thwarted at every turn. Almost every reader I talked to, most of them millennials, felt like this spoke to them on a deep personal level.

Step Two: Don’t Get Preachy

This is especially important when writing villains. Like a bartender or the guy who cleans the elevators in the Aruba Holiday Inn, a fiction writer shouldn’t moralize. Your writing loses its effectiveness if you don’t let your characters beliefs and actions speak for themselves.

In Crime and Punishment, for example, Dostoyevsky isn’t concerned with the moral implications of what Raskolnikov has done. He’s just trying to tell an exciting murder mystery.

Step Three: Create a Balance Between Positive and Negative

Saints and demons aren’t interesting. The worst of us have our virtues and best have our flaws. Hell, Hitler was a vegetarian and Steven Seagal donates to environmental causes. And then there’s Mister Rogers, who somehow thought children wanted to look at this fucking thing.

Complex and three-dimensional characters should be balanced. Like how Sherlock Holmes’s brilliance is balanced by his lust for cocaine. Or like how the dumbass clones in Never Let Me Go’s generosity is balanced by their inability to realize they ought to just go on a rampage and murder everyone.

Step Four: Use Flaws to Create Conflict

Think of any drama you experienced in real life. It was probably caused by a personal flaw. Maybe you got in a car crash because you really liked the way you looked in the rearview mirror. Maybe you lost your job because you’re so fucking dumb you thought the world’s most obvious conman really was looking out for what’s best for you. It could be anything.

In fiction, flaws like these should drive the narrative. Recklessness might get your hero’s friends killed. Callousness might tear a friendship apart. In basically any noir, being a thirsty simp for crazy strange is nearly always a catalyst for destruction. In my drama Storming the Gates of Heaven, the prejudice of the protagonist gets the story in motion. Karl Eichmann shoots a Mexican that he thinks is trying to illegally enter the US, only to find out that Grand Canyon isn’t actually located on the border between Mexico and the United States.

Whenever I start my writing workshops at the learning annex, one of the first questions students always ask me, after “Is this class fee refundable,” is “Is it okay to write about characters of a different race or sexual orientation?”

It’s a tough world out there right now. In addition to worrying about honing your skills, trying to get your name out there and getting cease and desist letters from your family to stop putting personal information about them in your YouTube videos, you also have to worry about getting cancelled.

You might feel like you wrote the perfect first page, one that was poetic and enticing and instantly draws the reader into your unique world, but after you think more about it, you get anxious that the woke mob will go after you for using the N-word six times.  In today’s video, I’ll show you how even the straightest, whitest Oberlin graduate who grew up in the suburbs of Indianapolis can write about any race, creed, gender or sexual identity. We’re going to put on our metaphorical blackface on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Race, religion, LGBT issues… lots of writers want to shy away from these topics. But the whole reason you’re a writer is to explore the unexplored and represent the underrepresented. We need more books about unique people and unique perspectives. Plus, it’s unfair to ask writers to limit their writing to their own personal experience. If that were the case, nobody from Omaha could ever succeed because who the hell wants to read a book set in modern-day Nebraska?

Before I get to the advice, I want you to relax. Acknowledge your discomfort, but be open to everything. We’ll never make any progress if we embrace our ignorance. Don’t be afraid to ask stupid questions in the comments. Men, don’t be afraid to ask our female viewership how a vagina works. Black people, don’t be afraid to ask our Chinese, Japanese and Korean viewership what the different slurs for “blacks” are in their native language so you can finally know what those people at the laundromat are really saying.

Step One: Do your research

As with anything else you write, a good story begins with great research. Don’t even think about race, gender or identity for a minute. Pretend you’re a Mormon who wants to write a book about an alcoholic. How would you go about doing it? Now, if it were me, I might do a few different things. I’d watch home movies of my father. I’d attend local AA meetings under false pretenses to get ideas. I’d hang out under a bridge at night. And in fact, these are all things I did when I wrote Plastered Bastard, a revenge thriller about a serial vehicle manslaughter perpetrator.

So when you are writing about another race, you need to come to know that race very well. Do the things you might think a person of that race does. Listen to recorded speeches of beloved political leaders, for example. Watch gay porn. Watch anime. Email your manuscript to someone in your office of that race, even if you don’t know them very well, to get their input. And if they’re a janitor without an email address, print out a copy and put it in their utility shed, as I’ve often done.

Step Two: Describe Your Characters in Detail – When I was teaching at the learning annex, I can’t tell you how many people would give me vivid, detailed descriptions of their white characters while the minority characters were just Black or Asian and the reader was supposed to fill in the blanks. Whenever I came across this, not only did I make this person write an apology to each member of the class, but I also made them wear a sandwich board that said “Ignorant Racist” for the rest of the lesson.

Let’s take an example.

Look at this woman. How would you describe her? Would black suffice? I don’t think so. I would describe her body as voluptuous and her lips as pouty and full. I would say that “her hair was shiny and silken and I wanted her to stand over me, completely naked, bending down and dangling the hair so it was just gently tickling the skin on my chest until I reached orgasm.”

Step Three: Don’t Be Ambiguous

For a writer, specificity is everything. In addition to your descriptions,  this also applies to your diverse characters’ backgrounds. Your character should never just be Native American or Mexican. Are they from the hills of Sinaloa or the slums of Juarez? It doesn’t just apply to race. When I write gay men, the first decision I have to make is if he’s a top or a bottom. Then I ask, Does he generate the power or is he just receiving the power? Does he prefer reach arounds or is he willing to let the release come of its own accord?

Step Four: Avoid Savior Narratives

At the learning annex, I used to have this one student. We’ll just call him Jeff Stanley Wilson. Though he was an older guy, he was about as woke as a boomer gets. He followed all of the above rules pretty well and created some diverse, three dimensional characters of color and other sexual orientations. But Jeff’s problem was his heroes were always white males. And they also were described exactly the way he looked, bald head, glasses and six foot seven. And they were also all named Jeff Stanley Wilson.

I always told Jeff that he was limiting himself as a writer by doing this. Sure, like Jeff you may write as a kind of wish-fulfillment to forget that your wife left you and your son was killed by a drunk driver, but it sends the wrong message to say that people of color rely on whites to be saved. And it’s just not very true to life. I mean, look at… all of history.