Love the Sinner

There's a line from the movie Birdman that has stuck with me: "It's what you always do. You confuse love for admiration."As a writer, I am tempted to create characters that I admire, because it's easy. Rex Jackson is a billionaire playboy who has excelled in all four major sports leagues and founded the unicorn startup Clickr, from which he has taken the profits to mass produce his cure for cancer. This guy deserves his fame and glory. But if he died suddenly, it would at most elicit a "hmm" and furrowed brow from me as I read my morning news. To get at why, I'll steal a quote: "There are two ways to dehumanize someone: dismiss them, or make them a god."In The Great Gatsby, I love Gatsby because he yearns to be with Daisy, and fails, and it's his own fault. Holden Caulfield can't connect with the adults on his journey through New York, and King Lear is, to use his own words, old and foolish.  The struggle makes the story. Rex Jackson from the paragraph above would have no trouble getting Daisy to love him, or connecting with his peers. And so Rex Jackson wouldn't be a good candidate for a character.Today's exercise is to describe a character's flaws.***When she knows she's wrong, she gets louder, so the sound can fill the space where her confusion was. She eats too much ice cream. When you're about to finish your cone, she puts another scoop on top, without even asking.She assumes you're Republican. When you're having a fight, she says to stop the car, yes right now, and gets out in the middle of the road. Most Saturdays she sleeps past noon. She mixes her tea with coffee, decaf for both.She's naive about money, and politics, and hasn't changed her mind on much since her twenties.She's just the one for me.***That's all I have in the tank for today. Tomorrow, point of view!Getting Started: 1Character: 1Point of View and Tone: 0Plot and Narrative: 0Dialogue and Voice: 0Descriptive Language and Setting: 0Revision: 0Overall: 0