A Worthy End
The unfortunate fact of life is that humanity is flawed. Lovely way to start a post, isn’t that? But it’s true. Because of the Fall and original sin, every one of us makes mistakes every day. And so when authors write, we seek to create characters as genuinely flawed as ourselves. As readers, that’s the kind of stories we look for as well. When we read of characters who have no flaws, we consider them ill-formed because really, they’re not how we are but how we want to be . That’s wishful thinking, not characters to whom we can relate—and we don’t like that. So we—both readers and writers—look for characters like ourselves. We want to “live a thousand loves and love a thousand loves”, and we can only do that if we read, and read about characters with a bit of ourselves in them. One of the (arguably, I admit, but I’ve never met anyone who disagrees) greatest authors of British Literature was J.R.R. Tolkien, and not just because of his impressive world-building ski
