Jenyfer Matthews

I’m extremely pleased to have Liz Jasper, author of the 2008 EPPIE Award winning mystery Underdead, with me this week. Liz is a frequent contributor to Lady Jaided Magazine and blogs regularly at The Pink Fuzzy Slipper Writers. To learn more about her Underdead mystery series, and for updates on the upcoming release of Underdead in Denial, visit her website.

Underdead

When she finds a body on her classroom floor with teeth marks in his neck, she must figure out whodunnit before her Underdead secret gets out. But she’s running out of time. The detective in charge of the case is dogging her every move, her vampire traits are evolving in new and embarrassing ways, and someone wants Jo dead…the traditional way!

Now sit back and let Liz tell us why perfect heros and heroines are b-o-r-i-n-g…

One of the temptations of a writer is to make one’s “good” characters a little too good. But the irony is no one actually likes a character who is good to the core and perfect in every way.

Imagine a stunningly beautiful heroine with shiny, golden hair that, without the slightest effort on her part, curls becomingly from the moment she awakens (with a charmingly dainty yawn) until her thick, black lashes flutter closed once again over her lovely violet eyes. She has a flawless 36-26-36 figure, drives a convertible Bentley and — lest you think wealth has spoiled her character — works hard every day running a charitable foundation to which she herself has donated millions. Her ready laughter is the musical tinkling of water running down a stream. She’s dating an equally handsome, muscular demi-god, a blond Ken to her Barbie–only he has his own money and runs his own charitable foundation. The fact that he is anatomically incorrect is only a literary device representing his manfully chivalrous restraint around our beautiful heroine, who is saving her virtue for the moment the glittering, rare, pink, two-carat diamond he has put on her left ring finger is joined next July by a platinum wedding band.

Everybody in the book loves our heroine, save one. She has one enemy, whom no one in town likes, as Ms. Evil is mean, spiteful, works for a for-profit corporation and has black hair. It is page 135 in our story and our unflappable, flaxen-haired heroine is curling ribbons on Easter baskets for the poor. It is nine-o- clock on Easter Sunday and– look! With her usual, impeccable planning, our unflappable heroine finishes the last curl on the last basket just in time to meet her fiancé for brunch. For being tardy is a rudeness to which she would never impose on another living soul.

Now. Who’s with me wanting to push her over a cliff? Raise your hand if you find yourself rooting for her dark-haired nemesis.

Though we all instinctively want our heroes and heroine to be “good”, a character without flaws is inhumanly so. Worse, they are boring. We can’t relate to someone is perfect in every way and, more the point, we don’t want to.

For it is often one’s flaws that give one character. That make one memorable. That, oddly enough, make one lovable.

Take, for example, my cat. (Stay with me, here.) For the past two weeks, I’ve had a beast of a cold. It was so horrible that I spent a couple of days in bed battling a high fever and a barking cough, slathered in menthol ointment I couldn’t smell and with a box of tissues under each arm. My cat, who is possibly the cutest cat on the planet, was there, on the bed with me. But she wasn’t cuddling close, in that fabled display of catly love one always hears about. (“It was so sweet — as I lay there sick and miserable, my darling cat somehow knew I needed her then more than ever and, purring, never left my side!”)

Not my cat. She wasn’t even in her usual day-time spot, at the foot of the bed on my side. My cat spent the entire 48 hours over on the other side, on the farthest possible corner of the bed for me. There was no purring. Most of the time I saw only the back of her. And when she did turn her furry little striped face in my direction, its sweet perfection was marred by the sort of cold glare only a cat can master. A look of co-mingled disgust and irritation that said clearly, “What are you doing in my bed? It is daytime. What about our agreement, that you work while I sleep, do you not get?”

And though I could have used some affection from the little turd, it is her innate crankiness that makes me like her so much. I entertained myself by inching closer, just to watch her crane her neck farther away to maintain the distance between us.

And, like my cat, whose sour disposition doesn’t mar the promise of her physical cuteness but makes her inexplicably more appealing, in a book, a character’s flaws pitted against their good points is often what makes them likeable.

Would you have liked Cinderella quite so much if at one point she hadn’t vented to her animal friends about how much she resented her step-family? Would Harry Potter have been as well-written a hero if he’d been universally-liked, the brightest student in his class, and happy all the time? And in Gone With The Wind, isn’t it because Scarlett O’Hara has so very many flaws burdening her character that we spend hour after hour fascinated by her, and, despite the parting words of Rhett Butler, we really do give a damn?

I happen to agree with Liz – characters with layers and complexity are more interesting to me. What do you think? Do you like perfection or are a few warts okay?

Buy this book!

Be Sociable, Share!

•