As a disclaimer, character abuse is completely legal, and can be considered necessary for a good story.

Some of my fellow old-timers will remember a time when I was a very plot-first writer who didn't spend much time developing characters. For the stories I wrote then, and may return to, that worked fine. Now? Not so much. I have slowly transformed into a character-first writer.

I think something important for this is having characters that are broken people. This creates significant inner conflict that can propel and enhance the external conflict.

My problem is that I still mostly come up with characters that are for plot oriented stories. They're heroes. People to look up to, with few, if any significant flaws. I'm not entirely sure how to take these shining paragons and drag them down into the mud and shatter their facade to reveal the humanity within.

Anyone have suggestions?

Varon, I've got the same kind of characters as you and have to settle the same problem.

In my mind, a really heroic character shall not be afraid of things which are not personal: So what I suggest is this : your character is heroic in many ways. Alright, but he might have a major fear he cannot control buried deep down in him -a fear which would be explained by a certain experience he had from childhood, for instance : claustrophobia, vertigo, fear of being abandoned by the ones he loves (which renders him very vulnerable effectively by making him dependent on other people's feelings towards him).

Now at a certain point in the story, this fear must be revealed and increased by a certain event, and makes the hero fail where everybody -including the reader - expected him to win (because he is thought of as heroic). The idea is that because of this fear, which leads him to failure, the hero may lose something which is very dear to him.

What would be extremely interesting is that the antagonist knew about the hero's weakness and drew upon it as much as possible to break the hero down.

Consequently, you can repeat the hero's failure several times in the story, so that the reader might at each time wonder whether he will succeed in overcoming his fear or not, but the hero must eventually fail.

Now, a highly heroic action from your hero would be this: at the end, the character is faced with a dilemma, between giving up to this thing he fears the most or doing his duty (which is to save the world, for exemple...xD) or saving someone he dearly loves, or killing the villain once and for all, and everybody knows about his fears now, and is anxious to see him succeeding or not (let the possibility of a tragic ending open all through the book). But this time the hero overcomes his fear and succeeds -and the reader is relieved, and rejoices with him, and your hero is all the more heroic because he vanquished a part of himself, a bad habit, the most difficult thing to do!

So, the heroism of your character is safe, but he is blatantly human.

That's the kind of scheme I use, and I hope it will help you

Sarai gave a great method for making heroic characters more vulnerable. It's what I've seen done before in several successful stories.

If you want characters that are not altogether heroic, and more... I don't know – normal, human?... then you kind of have to go about it a little different, I think. It mostly involves a lot of pain.

I'm not sure which kind you're talking about here.

Sarai: Good plan, thank you. I've done that before with another character. He was scared of pain to the extent he'd let himself be jammed in a locker rather than risk getting fight that would go badly. That made it a problem for him when he had to rescue someone and he had to fight to get her out after having to decide whether or not to do it.

I'm trying to find another flaw like at now. I just can't seem to find it.

Rwebu: Someone in the middle. Both heroic and human.

Well... maybe nearly perfect heroes are sometimes the easiest to make broken anyway.

I do know there was this one character I have who was very... nice. He was awesome, in a lot of ways. Not all ways, but a lot of ways.

But it just took one instance of where he was completely wrong about something for him to become a living terror. He didn't trust anyone, not even the people he had been through war and pain and terrors with for the past forty years, he blocked off everything and everyone, and became highly irrational and dangerous when making decisions, as well as not sleeping very well at all.

Because he was perfect, and then suddenly he wasn't, and he couldn't take it. I found, almost by accident, his weak place. It broke him to pieces, and it took a lot of work to put him back together again and make him decent.

I guess what I'm saying is... perfection is sometimes its own flaw. My character was highly intelligent, highly experienced, and highly (though not overly) confident. He was used to being right about the things he knew he was right about. Very used to it. So much that he went insane when something went wrong.

I'm not sure if that's very relevant, but maybe it'll mean something.

There's a couple ways I can think of.

Take away that one person he interacts with. 24/7 in the most horrific, mind-screwing, gruesome way that the hero can conceive. Then prod him and use the plot to keep reminding him of the fact.

Show him multiple failures at the same time, in the right places.

If an enemy pulls off a plan, have the hero find out what it is, prepare for it, then still fail. Better yet, have the villain use the hero's failure to speed his own plot. A quote I heard once is this:



On one of my stories I dabble in now, I'm gonna kill off the first person my character ever met in front of his eyes in a bloody mess. Despite the over-extreme-ness of this plan, sometimes an extreme is what pushes them over the edge.

If you don't already have such a character, have a deceitful love interest. Hormones, love, attraction, and lies are terribly difficult to tell apart.

If you have the perfect hero, design the perfect villain. Better yet, make a heroic companion who defects, or a perceived good guy that the hero himself can look up to, but with that one flaw.

Ender's Game had such a person. Read about Dink Meeker's fatal flaw according to Hiram Graff. (That's about as non-spoiler as I can get it.)

You could character develop the hero in a certain direction, and then set him in a no-win scenario where whatever he chooses, he has to live with. Have this scenario tie directly into his character development.

The issue I think sometimes happens is if you're trying to specifically break someone, you introduce new aspects that are driven only to drag your hero down and smash him to pieces. It may work, but now you have these new guys you pulled to drag him down.

What do you do with them?

Bleach, the popular Japanese manga I read, has a problem with this sometimes. Tite Kubo, the author, admits that whenever he gets stuck with the plot, he automatically introduces new people in just to push the plot where he wants it to go, ending up with loads and loads of characters.

(It's sort of turned into an advantage, because near the ending of this series, he's been able to take those existing loads of characters and bring them back for a second debut. It's still fueling the plot, but now the audience knows who they are at least. It's also a pleasant surprise for many.)

I think it's better if pre-existing devices, plots, and people who are already in the story are used. People are already more familiar with them, and might accept them better than this one guy who comes from left field as the direct opposition of the hero.

Some links that might (or might not) help.

Proceed at your own risk.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TragicHero
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FallenHero
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... Derailment (This one is more general)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OCStandIn
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... lFaceIndex
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... tyBusiness

(I realize that I keep talking about The Hero. Sorry if that's not who you were asking about, but it seems like the person you're trying to bring down is some sort of Archetypal Heroic character.)

I'm dealing with some of this myself. Too many stories with too many perfect characters.... Oh yeah. I think what Mistress Kidh said here is very valuable:

I don't know whether you want hypothetical shattering to reveal your hero' struggles so you can use them later, or if you want it directly in your plot: I've done both with one particular character, who's coming along quite nicely, if I do say so myself. (If you start hypothetical, it will probably find its way into the story anyway, so you don't really have a choice as it is). The main point is to batter them (hypothetically or not) from every possible and impossible angle, so as to reveal their true self, because it will be flawed, I can assure you (Maybe. Plenty of my characters need more battering before this hypothesis can be confirmed).

This could definitely do the trick. But I hate killing characters, so... Watch your character carefully. Is there something he relies too much on? What does he spend most of his time doing? Keep asking questions, and use the answers to your advantage.

That probably didn't help. Glad to be of waste to your time Mwahahahaha

It's a good point that you can actually just do horrible things to your character hypothetically, and still learn a lot from it about their flaws in normal life.

And another less pleasant kind of tactic: wait and learn and read good books. It used to be very difficult for me to make flawed characters, but over time as I paid attention to how things worked and to the people around me and to the people in the best stories I had read, it got easier and my characters got much better than they had been.

So sometimes it takes a bit, I think. I'm getting more skilled, slowly.

Something else I found pertains to different methods of killing your character off.

Not entirely relevant, but it might be in some way.