: Re: Handling an Inauthentic Character One of my main writing projects centers around a character rich with vices. Probably chief among them is self-interest, followed by dishonesty. When I say dishonesty,

@Bryan361

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To a large extent, whether a character is plausible or implausible depends on how well you justify it in the story. I've often read stories where I find myself saying, "Oh come on! Why would he do that?!"

It occurs to me that the more common problem in fiction is that characters are too simple rather than too complicated. I've read lots of stories where I say, "Oh brother, you can describe every character in this story completely with one sentence. He's the 'idealistic young man who can't deal with practical realities', or 'the villain who will stop at nothing in his pursuit of power', or 'the young woman who constantly puts herself in danger for no apparent reason and has to be repeatedly rescued by the hero', etc."

Depending on the nature of the story and how central this character is, you may be able to justify her behavior with two sentences of explanation, or the whole point of the story could be to explain how she came to be this way. As long as you give SOME explanation, and it's at least reasonably plausible. Like, don't just say "because she had a rough childhood" or "because she's crazy". But if you briefly said that, say, when she was a young woman she wanted to do X, and she lived in an environment where everyone around her hated X, and so she had to put on a façade her whole life, and she became accustomed to telling others what they wanted to hear and hiding her true feelings and so .... That might be enough to make me believe it.

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