What makes a flawed character? Are they divergent? Are they so far outside the norm as to make them unbelievable? Or are they simply more human? Aren’t we all flawed characters on the stage of life – good and bad, happy and sad, fickle and steady? You get my drift. All of our ways of being, as are all our characters’ idiosyncrasies, are in response to time and circumstance. What makes us happy one day or one minute renders us angry the next.  Our characters, the subjects of our fictions, are the same. In Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, Friedrich von Schiller works the tension between naivety and sentimentality to describe a conceived nostalgia or what has been lost – like childhood. That may be a place writers begin, but when this drama of memory goes beyond the experiential to negotiate meaning in a wider context, it can also represent a condition of possibility, an opening for nuanced manifestations of what it means to be human – things that make a life:  joy, humor, frustration, hardship, heartache, and so forth. What makes good character development is as multiple as what makes us human.  I like flaws in characters and people.