Writing heroes can be a buzzkill

Writing a hero is the worst. Hero’s, not anti-heroes, are constrained by a raft of things – like laws, and morality, and ethics, and integrity. It’s difficult (not impossible) to write a really interesting hero. But it’s just so much more fun to write the villain who generally has a certain…moral flexibility.

So, when writing a hero, how do you make them interesting, but still keep them on the ‘right’ side of law and order? The easy answer is to give them a fault or two…or ten. Maybe they’re a drunk, or a habitual cocaine user, or maybe they don’t tip well at the pub, or maybe they hate kittens.

Now, keep in mind, plenty of heroes have been written who don’t have screaming faults and I’m not saying these characters are bad or boring, I’m saying they are probably boring to write. Let’s consider:

Gandalf. I love Gandalf. I named one of my cats after him once upon a time (my favorite cat I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a lot of cats). Gandalf is a great character. What are his faults? Ummmm, he’s ashamed of his cousin (Radagast) because you only ever hear about him once. He’s a dick to hobbits, I suppose; he takes advantage of people by taking the best horse in the country; he torments dwarves by waiting until sunrise to get rid of trolls rather than going in there and magicing the hell out of them. So, yeah, Gandalf has some faults but he’s not horrible.

Dumbledore. I like Dumbledore less and less the more I think about him. He’s an egotistical information hoarder who sends children into potentially fatal situations, and he’s a total bastard to Snape for years. He’s a bad parent, essentially, and a bad brother, actually. We never even knew he had a brother, or sister, until like, six books in. And, like Gandalf, could save everyone a lot of pain and trouble if he were to take out his wand every now and then and wreck some dudes. Who would have complained if he just slapped the hell out of Malfoy, or his father? No one. That would have given him enough street cred to do nothing the rest of the way through the books.

Luke Skywalker. If ever there was a human version of milquetoast, it’s the whiny little crab-ass that is Luke Skywalker. Maybe his ‘woe-is-me’ schtick is his weakness, but I think Star Wars would be fine without him. He’s replaceable. Star Wars is not a story where I think, wow, without Luke they’d be screwed. What I think is, find me another dude with a high midichlorian count and send him to Yoda to take his training like a man and actually learn to do the damned thing he can do. I have the same problem with Harry Potter to be fair. I’m not sure why this type of hero construct continues to exist or do as well as it does. Maybe it’s me.

The MCU’s version of Tony Stark (actually the Marvel comics version too). This is a great hero because the man has issues. Real, ‘he’s kind of a dick’ issues – drinking, womanizing, ego – all wrapped in a cool suit. Whereas Captain America…not so much. There are a lot of ‘would he do that?’ questions when writing a Captain America that you don’t have when writing a Tony Stark.

Then there are anti-heroes, like Deadpool. People love deadpool and it would be a hoot to write Deadpool because there is nothing he can’t do. I can hardly imagine a situation where a writer would say, ‘no, that’s not something Deadpool would do.’ And that’s why he is so much more entertaining than the other examples.

In the end it comes down to finding enough ‘realism’ in your character. If you are trying to write a lawful good character, he/she needs to have some baggage – probably egotistical baggage, maybe drinking baggage or anti-religious baggage – maybe all three. That might be fun. The character could then still always choose to do the thing that is ‘right’ but might make alternate choices if they were drunk, or slap the hell out of a priest or something.

Writing, when you think about it, is work. I never wanted to admit it, but along about book three, I realized it was work. It’s not ditch-digging work, mind you; but it’s taxing to have to consider all these different things, and create a character out of whole cloth. As people we are still evolving our own characters over decades, but as writers we’re supposed to make a realistic character in weeks and months – and make that character likable, and/or hateable, and give them enough agency so that they can redeem themselves if necessary. They have to make good choices, and probably some bad choices, and each of those choices has to further the plot. 

As people we are all flawed. Some of us are really very badly flawed, and for a character to be successful, we as readers need to be able to see within that character something of ourselves. A hero who is good; relentlessly pious or whatever doesn’t connect with us in the same way as someone with some pretty glaring character deficiencies. So the trick is to make a flawed character who can still make good choices to bring about a satisfactory ending – without the reader wanting to punch that character in the throat.