Love what you hate about your Main Character…

...and we will love him even more. As a writer, I think I would love to create that character who is so much better than I ever was as a kid. You know, the kid who always knows the right thing to do—and does it. He’s confident and clever, never says the wrong thing or hurts anyone’s feelings. Free from prejudice or self-righteous indignation. Never afraid, never stupid...

BORING!!!! No kid can relate to that…or live up to that. The thing that really makes a character work is more than just some quirk, like plucking his eyebrows bald in a nervous fit every time he has an algebra exam, or, to quote a recent top 25 list, chews his lip until he tastes blood. No, let him be FLAWED in some real way. I have to remind myself of that, even now as I think of the characters I’ve already written and already love. It doesn’t have to be a flaw of Shakespearean magnitude, (You can go to bed now, MacBeth…) but somewhere in your book, he should make the reader just a little uncomfortable, squirm in his seat just a bit while trying to defend your dear MC. Of course, this is where you can draw on personal experience, right? The list of bonehead moves in my childhood could just about match the collected works of our dear old master of tragedy, Mr. Bill. But what inside me led to those actions? What in my character made me say such a stupid remark or do such an asinine thing?

Think about the characters you really love—even Harry Potter has his faults. A deeply good heart, noble even, but there’s plenty of self-doubt which is sometimes costly; a nice helping of rashness, though understandably so; even some serious prejudice of his own, though not completely unfounded or even deep-seated.

So what “issues” does your MC have? What are those little things that make you want to kick his butt and send him to his room without supper? If you don’t have any, maybe you should.