Holding out for a hero

What are the essential characteristics of a hero you can root for?

I love this question, because it gets at the heart of what we truly want from a protagonist. We don’t always want the perfect role model (in fact that can turn very dull, very quickly), and we don’t want someone who’s simply a fascinating character. We want a protagonist we can deeply identify with, and to me that means a hero who has flaws. As someone who writes primarily women protagonists I do my best to make sure my characters are flawed. And I’m not talking about the completely overdone tropes of klutziness (Mindy Kaling wrote an excellent bit on this in one of her books) or father issues or she was an ugly duckling growing up but now she’s gorgeous and doesn’t know how to deal with it. I mean serious, seemingly insurmountable flaws. The kind of flaws that each one of us has that we keep buried in the back of our minds, doing our very best to keep shut tightly into a box. The kind of flaws that come spilling onto the page when we write in our journals and would be mortified if anyone knew. They don’t have to be glaring neon bright flaws, either, like addiction or serious mental health issues, but they do need to be real stuff. Crippling jealousy, a horrible temper that ruins relationships, an ego that makes it impossible to listen to anyone else’s opinion without silently dismissing them as an idiot, the kind of greed that creates such severe tunnel vision that you’ll give up your nearest and dearest if it gets you what you want. These flaws sound like exaggerated caricatures when they’re written out so baldly like this, but all of us experience them on some level, or something similar.

When we read a book with a protagonist who carries these types of flaws, we root for them because we see ourselves in them. They’re a surrogate for our own struggles, and if they can overcome them, even in the smallest way, it gives us hope.