Weakness

I've talked before about making your characters strong, and how you don't want to go overboard with it or risk having a character that never faces a threat throughout his journey. There needs to be a certain amount of weakness of one kind or another to them, in a sense, and preferably a kind that can at least partially be overcome. After all, it's called character growth for a reason - they don't grow if they start at the end, but they also don't grow if they end where they started.

And as much as I hate to say it, I think there's a lot of people out there who kind of forget about that last part. Both as readers and as writers, they seem to think that to make a character realistic, they have to put weakness on their character, and that that weakness must remain when the story ends. It's not about characters growing past their weaknesses to these people, but rather that they can succeed despite their weakness. And there is certainly something to that, it's hard to deny. To see someone succeed against the odds is an incredible thing to witness, but it takes a lot of hard work, dedication, and finding ways to work around that weakness. Which, in it's own way, is growing and finding strength.

It's a game of give and take, as it is with most things. At the most very basic level, it's having strength but no intelligence, or vice versa. If you can't bend someone's bones, then bend their will kinds of things. But there are much more subtle kinds of weakness as well. A poor control of one's anger or sadness. Bad hearing or poor depth perception. Perhaps they have a hard time remembering faces or directions. All small things that, when used well and consistently, can be a much heavier hindrance on one's quest than you might initially believe.

And then there are the larger problems. Things like mental or physical disabilities, missing or malfunctioning limbs, and whether or not they can even speak the language of the people around them. What race, age, class, or gender they are, and how the people around them respond to that. And you can pile these problems and weaknesses onto a person endlessly, but at what point will you eventually find that they no longer have the capacity to overcome these endless weaknesses?

Much like strength, I find that this is the part people forget. They go overboard with their weaknesses, just as they do with their strengths, and the story goes from overcoming with to dealing with. And in a way I suppose that does in fact make it more realistic for some people. And perhaps that is the kind of story that they would like to read. But if you ask me, it certainly isn't one I would want to read. After all, I read stories to escape from the weaknesses of my own life. Not to be reminded of them.