by Becca Puglisi

What does your character fear the most? You need to know because that fear will motivate them throughout the story and contribute to their fatal flaw—something they must address if they want to achieve their goal and grow as a character.

You see, when a deep fear or insecurity is triggered, characters instinctively default to a familiar defense mechanism. Usually, this is a knee-jerk response that helps them deflect, control, or avoid emotional pain. Dishonesty, denial, aggression, and isolation are examples of these self-protection measures.

Those behaviors and flaws in response to perceived threats are a kind of emotional shielding that keeps potentially threatening people and situations at a distance. They’re unique to the character’s life and personality, most often arising in the aftermath of a painful experience.

Let’s look at this in action with young Lindsay.

A Character Arc Character Study

Eight-year-old Lindsay was abandoned by her mother at the mall. What she takes from thisawful experience is that the people who say they love you might not, and they could leave you at any time. This makes sense to Lindsay. Her mom did say she loved her, and she was a good mom at times—but at the end of the day, she chose to dump Lindsay without looking back.

So Lindsay goes into foster care, where she encounters more people who don’t care about her, use her for their own reasons, and generally aren’t in her corner. Over the years, this deepens her belief that if you let others get close, they’ll either hurt you or bail when things get too hard.

Her desire to be part of a family is overpowered by her fear of being abandoned again. To protect herself, she behaves in ways that discourage people from engaging. She’s rude, hostile, and emotionally distant. These tendencies are like a porcupine’s quills, warning people to keep away.

Analysis

Lindsay experienced something horrible as a child, and her greatest fear is that it might happen again. So she adopts new traits and behaviors to protect herself. And to a degree, they work, because people can’t abandon her if they’re always kept at arm’s length. The problem with using flaws and unhealthy defense mechanisms for self-protection is that they also block good things: healthy relationships, positive opportunities, and the chance to work through problems constructively and build resilience.

Knowing this information for Lindsay, we see a snapshot of who she is at the start of the story: wanting to be loved and belong but isolated, fear-driven, and unable to trust. And as her fear becomes more entrenched over time, her emotional shielding also deepens, creating new problems in her current story.

Lindsay’s hostility keeps people away, and this suits her just fine. But as she gets older, it starts being an issue—like when she mouthed off to the corner store owner when he didn’t give her a job, and she ruined any future opportunities there.

In her late teens, she’s placed with a new family that seems to truly care and isn’t scared off by her tough-girl attitude. Their daughter is her age, and for the first time Lindsay has someone to talk to and hang out with. But when the family brings up adoption, Lindsay’s fear of abandonment is triggered because the only family she’s ever had took off.

Her hostility rises as it always does when she feels threatened—and if she lets it out, it could stop the adoption in its tracks. Is that what she really wants?

Analysis

This is a crossroads moment for Lindsay. She’s become aware of both her fear and how her behavior is limiting her. To achieve her goal of belonging to a family, she needs to heal from her pain of being abandoned, and the opportunity is right here. It terrifies her, but she wants to find a family who loves her. To do that, she must 1) fight her fear instead of being ruled by it and 2) overcome her fatal flaw.

The Two Parts of a Fatal Flaw

In fiction, a character’s fatal flaw is the central internal obstacle they must overcome to reach their goal. It has two parts: a behavioral component—something they do—and a cognitive component—something they believe, also known as a false belief.

Lindsay’s fatal flaw is her hostility (behavioral) combined with the idea that letting people in leads to hurt (cognitive). If she doesn’t challenge both, her fate will be sealed and any hope of being part of a family will go up in smoke. But why would she reject her fatal flaw when it’s helped her feel safe for so long?

Growth can only happen when the character recognizes that her defensive behavior is keeping her stuck. What’s causing Lindsay’s hostility? Her fear of abandonment. By recognizing how much power her fear holds over her life, she takes the first step toward subduing it.

Newly aware of fear’s stranglehold, Lindsay challenges herself to see past the fear and view her life objectively. Her foster family’s unconditional love has created opportunities for Lindsay to be herself. She remembers moments when she let her guard down and nothing bad happened. When she spoke her mind, she wasn’t kicked out. Without fear obscuring her view, she now sees that putting herself out there emotionally doesn’t always result in harm.

Analysis

A new belief takes hold: Lindsay needs people, and vulnerability is a necessary part of achieving that end. It’s a risk worth taking. With this new perspective, she sees that her hostility is standing in the way of what she wants, and she can take steps to respond differently when she feels threatened, letting people in instead of keeping them out.

Backstory Elements You Need to Know

This is a character study of a change arc in action. To win in the story, the protagonist must face their fear, challenge their false belief, and replace the behavioral aspect of the fatal flaw with productive habits. This isn’t easy. It means embracing vulnerability for the hope of something better, and only someone truly committed to change can achieve it.

It also requires you, as the author, to know exactly what your character must overcome so you can provide the opportunities for growth that will enable them to succeed (or fail, if you’re writing a tragedy). To get there, you’ll want to identify the following backstory elements of your character’s arc:

• Their wounding event
• The specific fear it spawns
• The lie they believe about themselves or others (it explains, in their mind, why the wounding event happened)
• Their shielding behaviors and traits they adopt to protect themselves from experiencing the same trauma again
• Their fatal flaw: the cognitive aspect (the lie) plus the behavioral aspect (their go-to trait or behavior meant to protect them). Your character will have adopted many shielding behaviors in the wake of their trauma, but one of them should rise to the top as their default response that protects them when they’re threatened while keeping them from getting what they want the most.

Armed with this information, you’ll have a good idea who your character is on page one, how fear will drive them, and the fatal flaw they’ll have to address by the end. And you can build a story that will get them exactly where you want them to go.

For more information about the fatal flaw, fear’s role in character arc, and how it contributes to your story, check out The Fear Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to What Holds Characters Back.

Do you create your character’s backstory to help identify their fatal flaw? What character flaws do you tend to use? Is there a character with a specific fatal flaw that sticks with you?

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About Becca

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and best-selling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and other resources for writers. Her books have sold over 1.4 million copies and are available in multiple languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online resource for authors that's home to the Character Builder and Storyteller's Roadmap tools.

Top Image by John Hain from Pixabay