Awful Writing Handbook

This course is about the specific ways good intentions produce bad characters. Its central example is among the most common failures. Seeing exactly how a well-meant character dies on the page teaches you more than any amount of general advice. The lessons come from watching writers build people who should work and don’t.

Then diagnosing the precise mistake. You learn to recognize it in your own drafts before it kills your characters too.

This course teaches character failure by dissection, starting with the most instructive corpse in modern fiction.

Failed characters are the best teachers a writer can find, as far as I’m concerned. A great character hides its construction. A failed one shows you the exact beam that gave way, and that lesson sticks better than any amount of admiring analysis.

The invulnerability problem

Consider the character who walks into a room full of adversaries already smarter, tougher, and better than all of them. She delivers a quip. She wins effortlessly. She never once doubts herself. The story wants you to cheer. You check your phone instead. This character fails for a reason that’s nothing to do with the noble goal behind her, strong representation, a corrective to decades of helpless damsels, a figure young readers could admire. The goal is good. The execution kills the character before she draws breath.

The mistake is confusing strength with invulnerability. A character who can’t fail, can’t doubt, and can’t be hurt has nothing at stake. A character with nothing at stake generates no tension and invites no investment. The reader knows she’ll be fine no matter what. Strength that’s never been tested isn’t strength, it’s a given, and readers don’t connect with givens. They connect with people who could lose and choose to fight anyway.

The invulnerable character is boring not despite her power but because of how it was built, as a wall against weakness instead of a quality earned against real resistance.

Invulnerable heroes bore me no matter who they are or what they’re meant to stand for. The problem sits entirely in the construction. A character who can’t lose gives me no reason to hold my breath, and a story that gives me no reason to hold my breath has lost me.

Watch: 7 Mistakes That Scream “Amateur Writer”, Alyssa Matesic

Weakness is what makes strength legible

Strength only reads as strength against the possibility of failure. A character we watch struggle, doubt, and nearly break, then push through, is powerful in a way the invulnerable character can never be, because we saw the cost and the choice. The reader measures strength by what it overcomes, so a character who overcomes nothing registers as strong on paper and flat in experience. Take away the possibility of failure and you take away the meaning of every success.

This is why the fix for a flat, invincible character isn’t to make them weaker in ability but to make them vulnerable in stakes, to give them something they can lose, a fear they have to face, a doubt they have to overcome. The competence can stay. What has to change is that the competence now works against real resistance, real risk, real interior struggle, so that when the character prevails, the reader feels it as an achievement instead of a foregone conclusion.

Give your strong character a real weakness, and paradoxically you make them stronger on the page, because now their strength means something. I wish more writers knew this fix. Keep the competence and take away the safety. The moment a capable character has something real to lose, every scene with her in it gets tense, and her wins start to feel like wins.

Good intentions are not a method

The deeper lesson underneath the invulnerability trap is that good intentions don’t produce good characters, and writers who lead with the message instead of the person reliably kill the thing they meant to celebrate. Wanting to write a strong woman, a noble hero, a positive representation, is a fine motive and a terrible method, because a character built to embody a virtue becomes a symbol, and symbols don’t bleed or fear or doubt. That means readers can’t connect with them. The intention was to inspire.

The result inspires nobody because it forgot to be a person first.

The discipline is to build the human being before the message, to make a real, flawed, vulnerable person and let whatever you wanted to say emerge through them instead of replacing them. A strong female character who works is first a specific person with specific fears and failures who happens to be strong, and the strength works because she’s a person we believe in instead of a statement we’re being asked to applaud. Lead with the person and the message takes care of itself.

Lead with the message and you get a Girl Boss, admired by nobody, cheered by the movie and ignored by the audience checking their phones.

What frustrates me about symbol characters is the waste. Somebody cared enough to write a hero, and the caring ended up flattening her. Build the person with fears and failures first, and whatever you wanted to say will come through her stronger than any speech could make it.

Diagnose before you fix

The value of studying failed characters is that it teaches diagnosis, the ability to look at a character who’s not working and name the precise reason, the skill that lets you fix your own. Most writers can feel when a character is flat but can’t say why, and without the why they flail, adding traits and backstory that don’t address the actual problem. Learning to see the specific failure, invulnerability, symbol-over-person, stakes that don’t exist, turns a vague sense of wrongness into a solvable problem.

That’s why dissecting bad characters is more useful than admiring good ones. A character that works hides its mechanics, but a character that fails exposes them, showing you exactly where the construction went wrong. Once you can diagnose the common failures on the page, you start catching them in your own drafts at the point of writing, before they harden into a finished character nobody connects with.

Extra backstory is the fix writers reach for first, and it rarely works. A tragic past doesn’t give an invincible hero stakes. Diagnose first. If the problem is that she can’t lose, no amount of history will save her.

The goal isn’t to memorize a list of mistakes but to develop the diagnostic eye that sees why a character isn’t landing, because that eye separates writers who can fix their people from writers who only sense that something is off.

How can AI help you stop writing badly?

The characters are yours and the diagnosis is a skill you build.

No tool decides who your people are. But a tool helps sharpen the diagnostic pass. You can use AI to flag characters who face no real stakes or can’t fail, the invulnerability trap. You can have it check whether a character reads as a person or as a message wearing a person’s clothes. You can use it to test whether a character’s strength works against real resistance or floats free of any risk. It finds the failure. You build the person.

Good intentions deserve better execution than they usually get. Learn to name why a character fails and you’ll stop producing people readers ignore. That diagnostic eye is worth more to a writer than any list of rules, and I’d put it at the top of every writer’s training.

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