Here's a secret about writing successful fictional characters ("success" here meaning that which connects with readers): They should be broken. No good story ever came from someone being just fine and super-competent. If you think it did, and this is a main character we're talking about, look at that person again: Were they just fine and super-competent and pretending not to notice the chaos around them? Were they these things at the expense of something else? If so, guess what? Still broken.
We need this. It's an essential part of character, which makes it an essential part of drama, possibly THE most essential or at least primary part. Look at how many of Shakespeare's characters fall into this category. (Spoiler alert: All of them.) Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo, Juliet, Caesar, and so on: prideful, myopic, covetous, self-involved bunch of motherfuckers.
I am not someone who writes about flawless characters. Long before I have attended this workshop, or any other creative writing workshop, I knew great stories emerge from representing the fucked-upness of the characters involved. Although, I didn't always put it this way: broken, or broken-ness was not a term I used. But I have been aware of it on an intuitive, instinctive level. However, as I have been trying to write about a story set in the aftermath of December 6, 1992, I have been wondering--there isn't one version of broken-ness is this world. In fact, there are many many many. My biggest problem is, I do not have a language yet to write in stories and poems the broken-ness of the people who inhabit my world. I don't know for sure, but possibly this is the biggest struggle that every writer has to go through? To evolve a language which will succeed to represent the specific kind of broken-ness of his/her world? All I can say is, I am still groping in the dark!
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