An Essay Regarding the Process of Character Creation, as well as the Importance of Flawed Characters

Joshua Bishop

Tim Chase

Impact Literature World Literature

November 6th, 2017

        What makes a good character for a book?  For starters, you should not be able to summarize the character in one or two sentences.  People’s personalities are far more complex than that.  If an author were to start creating a character for a book, they should make sure that the character is complex enough.  Second, the character’s personality should not be revealed instantaneously.  In reality, it usually takes a bit of time for two people to actually find out more about each other.  If the character’s information is given away gradually, then that character will seem more realistic.  That is what an author would also probably do.  Third, the author would want to make sure that the character is not perfect.  In reality, no one is perfect, and a perfect character is appealing.  Characters with flaws are interesting, whereas characters that are perfect always come on top, always get the guy/girl, and pretty much always have perfect teeth.  That does not make for an interesting story.  With flawed, imperfect characters, however, the unexpected type of events start happening, and we start having an interesting story.  The story in which I will be giving examples with is the book “The Boy  Who Harnessed the Wind,” which was written by William Kamkwamba. He defines the main character, who also happens to be him, through his interactions with the characters Shabani, [fill in the blank], and Dr. Mchazime.

        First off, we have a brief and minor character who shows up early on in the book named Shabani.  This character is described as a type which boasts a ton, and claims to have magical powers of a sort in which one can make one have super strength.  In the book, William agrees to have Shabani do some sort of magical freakiness which will give William super strength.  In this interaction, the author(William) shows that William was a kid who believed in superstitions, and that he was willing to do something that might not even be possible so that he would not be teased.

        The second interaction was after William had made the windmill.  He had finished wiring his house, and was doing more experimenting for other machines of some sort.  The ones in particular are the time when he made a tried making a walky-talky, a water pump, and biogas.  The water pump and biogas were failures, but he succeeded in making a walky-talky.  Anyway, all of this indicated that he was a rather eager person, an ambition person.

        The last interaction that I am going to cover is with Dr. Mchazime, who was the person who made William famous, and got William’s story out to the world.  The interaction in mind was simply when he came and interviewed William about the windmill that William made.  This interaction marks the beginning of Williams fame, which shows that William has an extreme amount of willpower and perseverance.

        So far, all of the parts of William’s personality that I have mentioned were good qualities.  I am sure, however, that he was not a perfect person.  The problem that I had was that the book focused more on the storyline instead of the characters.  But the cool thing is that the character in the book, William, is also the writer of the book, making the book a sort of autobiography.  This fact means that the main character is a real person.  And as I said in the beginning of this essay, people are not actually perfect.  Therefore, I am sure that William is not perfect as well, making him a completely normal person.  And the thing about creating characters for books, is that you do not want characters that are perfect.  You want them to be imperfect people, which will make them perfect characters.  I encourage all storytellers to create characters in your stories that have flaws, so as to create the perfect characters.