On Writing: Should Heroes have Flaws?

I recently read an article about the process of writing a novel. When discussing character development, the author writes, “Perfect characters are boring…. Flaws create conflict. They drive decisions. They make your characters feel like real people.”

I don’t want my heroes to “feel like real people.” I want them to be larger than life, i.e., heroic. Of course, villains are a different story. They have flaws, and in my stories, their flaws are intellectual and moral.

Journalists write about “real people.” I am not, nor do I want to be, a journalist. I am a novelist.

The heroes in my novels embrace rationality as the primary virtue. If I portray them as being irrational, even momentarily, I would destroy the essence of the character. If I want my heroes to be virtuous, then they must be virtuous all the time, not just when it is expedient. Allowing my heroes to compromise their principles might make them “feel like real people,” but they would no longer be heroic.

The claim that characters should “feel like real people” is straight from the literary school of Naturalism. The Naturalists, Ayn Rand wrote, “claim that a writer must reproduce what they call ‘real life,’ allegedly ‘as it is,’ exercising no selectivity and no value-judgments.” My novels would be impossible to write if I subscribed to Naturalism. I am not interested in portraying people “as they are,” but as they could be and should be.

The Naturalists would claim that characters who do not compromise their principles are unrealistic. Real people, they would argue, compromise their principles all the time. And I say, “Speak for yourself.”

Human beings possess free will. We can choose to adhere to our stated convictions or to abandon them when it is expedient. That people can, and many do, compromise their principles does not mean that everyone does. And my choice to depict a moral ideal rather than “real people” is my proof.