Flawed - The Role of Flaws in Films and Stories - and Life

I did a script-writing course last year and one of the most interesting things I learned was that the central key to a successful script - one that will hold attention - is this business of character flaws.  Every good film is about a person with a dream of some sort and a flaw that keeps tripping them up, so their dream can’t come true.

The story of their journey is really the story of how they experience a crisis of sorts which forces them to come face to face with their flaw, and overcome it so that their dream can come to fruition.  The bigger the flaw, the greater the challenge.  And the more exciting and satisfying the triumph.

A lot of writers, myself included, tend to start out writing about “nice” characters that don’t have any flaws at all.  It makes for wishy-washy stories that are just dead boring and often saccharine.   Very forgettable.  I guess as an audience we want to see movies and read books that reflect our own challenges, and we want see the protagonist overcome them.

So a writer’s flaw can be fear of being bad.  Once I embraced that fear and let myself write characters with problems, my scripts came alive.  It’s much more fun writing, also.  It’s strange, we learn from very young that it’s somehow bad and wrong to have flaws.  Yet we want to see them in characters in books and movies, and when we read biographies they’re much more interesting if the subject has major flaws.

There’s a moral in this somewhere.  Maybe it’s this, that flaws aren’t about right and wrong, good and bad, they’re about that part of us which is ignorant of something better.  They draw us towards challenges and obstacles, and in finding a way to triumph we find ourselves.  Without flaws life, just like films and books, would be dull and wishy-washy.