John Truby's Weakness and Need

Weakness and need is probably where I see the most stories fail. A lot of writers think they're wise to this crucial step but aren't. Frank Miller, the comics writer and artist, is a great example of such a writer. If you read his Batman Year One or The Dark Knight Returns, you'll find bundles of description lavished on how tired or racked with pain Batman might be in a fight only to have him manfully grit his teeth and then roundhouse some thug through a brick wall. While this weakness does bear superficial resemblance to the Weakness and Need that you need for your protagonist, it actually achieves the opposite effect in many ways.

While you do need a Weakness to make your protagonist's triumph that much sweeter in the end, this Weakness has to be very deep. It has to form some substantial portion of the hero's identity and outlook on life. Then that Weakness has to stand directly in the way of your hero's desire. Then, by the story's end, they will have to either outgrow their weakness and achieve their desire or backslide into their old identity and lose what they were striving towards.

With these initial parameters in mind we can move onto my favorite addition of Truby's to the discussion of Weakness and Need: the distinction between a Psychological Weakness and a Moral Weakness. A Psychological Weakness limits and hurts only the hero. A Moral Weakness limits and hurts everyone else around the hero. There are many stories that provide a hero with a strong Psychological Weakness but no Moral Weakness. Rey from the new Star Wars films is such a hero. These stories provide a certain pleasure because they give us a character who is morally good and we get to see them triumph over evil after making themselves not just good but strong over the course of the story. Pleasurable as it is to see a pure, fresh-faced young hero stick it to a corrupt tyranny, it robs the storyteller of the opportunity to say something more substantial about human weakness and morality. If we are morally obligated to act a certain way, then surely we have to start somewhere.

This is where stories about characters with deep Moral Weaknesses come in. These stories allow us to treat much thornier subjects and expand the scope for human development considerably. It brings to mind something that Nietzsche said: "I have often laughed at weaklings who though themselves good because they had no claws." If the hero in your story doesn't hurt those around them, then they may be a morally good person but it may also be that they are simply a morally ineffectual person. Since stories track human growth and since learning how to conduct yourself towards other people involves a great deal of trial and error, we need stories in which a character conducts themselves in a way that hurts someone other than themselves and then learn how to overcome that Weakness, rather than simply having some mysterious aura of goodness that cordons them off from this sphere of growth.