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A lot of the time, characters are written so that they are 100% good or bad. The protagonist is perfect, good looking, and maybe he has mild claustrophobia as a weakness. The villain is evil, kills puppies and shoots up old ladies in his spare time, and maybe every now and then he tortures someone who spilt his coffee instead of killing them.

If you haven’t guessed, that is not ideal, and is probably best to be avoided. Dramatically.

For characters to feel real, they need to be more complex than just the personification of good and evil. Both of those do have their places, but typically, we don’t use them.

For your Protagonist, try to give them a dark side. For your Villain, try to give them a redeeming quality.

The Protagonist should have times where they get it wrong and mess up. They should have to fight against something within themselves in order to win. They can’t be perfect all of the time.

Your villain will have so much more strength if you just give them some sort of fun part to their personality. Also, giving them a decent reason to be ‘evil’ is just about a requirement for a good villain. Javert is one of the best examples of this; A policeman who feels convinced that God wants him to catch the criminal, only, he has gotten to the point that he forgets the meaning of mercy. You can understand him fully.

Flaws and the other sides of characters are vital to making them worth reading, and those are some of the main ideas that come to my mind regarding it. What do you think?

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