Character Growth, Change, and Flaws

Just look at your own life for an example! You probably have overcome challenges in spite of your own flaws, as we all have, or you have worked past some of them while others remain. "Growing" doesn't mean "achieving perfection." In fiction as in life, sometimes it means accepting that you have limitations and learning how to thrive anyway.

I think blueobsidian's response hit the nail on the head. Just because we become better people for having lived through certain things, doesn't necessarily mean that we become perfect.

For example. When my grandmother died, I realized how much I had taken her for granted, how impatient I'd often been with her.

It took me a while, as a kid, to add up all the dots, but I started making a physical effort to be more understanding toward my remaining grandmother's, shall we say, grandmotherly instincts of constantly trying to feed me something, drag me with her to this place or that, etc. I haven't always succeeded, and certainly I'm flawed in lots of other ways, but I think I have become a better person as a result.

If a literary example is what you want, I'd bring up, perhaps, Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby. He wasn't perfect before the story, and he wasn't perfect after, but I think he was changed. Gene Forrester in A Seperate Peace, and Ester in The Bell Jar are other examples. Or, recall Obi Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, and Luke Skywalker from Star Wars. All those characters undergo radical growth throughout the Star Wars Saga, but at no time are they ever "perfect."

On the other hand, I'd like to distinguish between character development and character growth. Character development is a necessity. It's basically getting the reader's acquainted with your characters. Character growth, doesn't always have to be, however. Take the nameless narrator in Dosteovsky's The Underground. I don't think there was any real evolution or growth during the book. Development, yes. Growth, no, not in my opinion. If done well though, it can make for very compelling reading nevertheless.

Okay, well let's take a look at, say, Anakin Skywalker.
Now, let's pretend that Episode 3 is a standalone movie for a moment.
Slowly, throughout the course of the movie, Anakin begins getting closer and closer to the dark side. For a good long while, he was still essentially a good friend, a good "husband," and a good person.

But after he helped send a certain badass jedi flying out of a 10,000 story window, he finally gave into temptation and turned to the dark side.

The movie culminates in him attacking the woman he loves (the main reason he turned to the dark side in the first place), and fighting his best friend and mentor. And it ends with him being put in that familiar black suit.

So, while the Anakin at the end of the movie is very different from the Anakin at the beginning, he is still flawed. In fact, perhaps he is even more flawed (which is also a possibility to explore.)

For evidence of a positive growth, we can look at luke skywalker, who turns from a whiny brat in episode IV to a full fledged Jedi who gambles on what's left of his father's humanity and comes out a winner. But is he perfect? No. His confidence in his father borders on naievete, he is reluctant to strike him down even though he knows full well of all the evil that his father has helped perpetrate (including what would amount to genocide, mind you), and he THROWS AWAY HIS LIGHTSABER in front of palpatine. A show of cockiness that almost gets him killed.

So. Did he change? Yes. Was he perfect? No.

I hope I managed to answer your question. Though if you haven't seen star wars then you might not fully get my explanation... lol.

Flaws aren't something you can pour water on and wash away.

The character will still be flawed at the end of the story.

But as the story unfolds and things happen to him, he will meet other people who affect him emotionally. As he interacts with them, and makes decisions and takes action, he will learn from this. What to do, what to say, how to react.

At the end, he'll still be flawed, but he will have grown emotional armor to help him deal with the stuff he couldn't cope with before. He's different now, he's learned things, maybe he's learned something about himself. He knows he can handle things better now, he doesn't get so worked up about stuff, he knows he can deal with them. He still has flaws but he knows what they are, and tries to keep them under control.

He has grown as a person. His attitude has changed. That's character growth and change, just as a simple general example -- it's not meant to apply to every character in every story.

-Derek

Characters conquer some flaws, but other flaws remain. It depends on how you want them to grow throughout the story. For example somebody might start out a coward and learn to become brave, but becoming brave doesn't mean he doesn't still, say, chew his fingernails.

My MC, for example, is always trying to conquer her flaw of fearing becoming like her greatest enemy, and she goes a long way toward doing so--but the fear never ENTIRELY goes away, she just learns to stop denying it; and her other flaws of being short tempered and too idealistic, etc., remain all throughout the story. (Though I should say that to some extent they, too, are modified.) She overcomes some things, but is still quite flawed, just like real people. No matter how great a challenge we meet it won't help us overcome EVERY flaw in our personality.

People change, but some things tend to remain the same no matter what.

I have to say its not just your MC's that have to grow but even your secondary characters need to grow as well.

If you read RTD's "The Writer's Tale" which is a year long conversation with Ben Cook of writing for Doctor Who and he mentions re-writing a story in s4 called "The Fires of Pompeii" and there is a secondary character for just that episode and he mentions how you have to flesh him out and make him grow.

He describes it as turning the character for example in that episode, there's a character called Quintus and he starts off as a bit of a rebel to his parents, the next he is greedy, then he is brave, then he is caring for his sister etc. while still having a certain Quintus' feeling to his character.