I was about three chapters into a short story when I realized my protagonist was about to do something incredibly stupid. She was going to lie to her best friend about something that really mattered. And my first instinct was to stop her.

I actually sat there, fingers hovering over the keyboard, thinking: no, wait. She’s smarter than this. She wouldn’t do that.

But here’s the thing. She absolutely would. Given everything I knew about her, her fear of confrontation, her history of avoiding hard conversations, lying was exactly what she’d do in that moment. It just wasn’t what I wanted her to do.

So I let her lie anyway. And honestly? That decision changed how I think about writing characters.

The Instinct to Protect Our Characters

I don’t know if other writers feel this, but I get weirdly protective of my characters. Especially the ones I like. I want them to be clever. Sympathetic. I want readers to root for them.

Which means I sometimes catch myself steering them away from choices that might make them seem bad. Or petty. Or foolish.

But stories don’t really work that way, do they?

I’ve been reading a lot about character-driven fiction lately, trying to understand why some characters feel so alive on the page while others fall flat. And one thing keeps coming up: characters become real when they’re allowed to be flawed. Not in a quirky, endearing way. In a genuinely messy, sometimes frustrating way.

The kind of flawed where you’re reading and you think, oh no, don’t do that. But they do it anyway. Because that’s who they are.

What I Mean by “Bad Choices”

I should clarify. I’m not talking about characters doing evil things for shock value. That’s a different conversation.

What I mean is smaller, human-scale bad decisions. The kind real people make all the time.

Like saying something hurtful in the heat of an argument, even when they know better. Avoiding a difficult conversation until it’s too late. Choosing short-term comfort over long-term honesty. Letting pride get in the way of asking for help. Making assumptions instead of actually listening.

These are the choices that create friction. That make relationships in fiction feel textured and real. And they’re the ones I used to smooth over without even realizing it.

The Story That Taught Me This

Back to my protagonist and her lie.

I let her do it. She lied to her friend, and it wasn’t a dramatic, soap-opera lie. It was a quiet one. A lie of omission, really. She just didn’t correct a wrong assumption because correcting it would’ve meant admitting something she wasn’t ready to face.

And then I had to write what happened next.

Which was hard. Because the lie didn’t blow up immediately. It just sat there, this small wrong thing between two people who cared about each other. It changed how they talked. It added weight to conversations that used to be easy.

I didn’t plan any of that. It just happened because I followed the logic of the choice.

By the time the truth came out, three chapters later, it actually meant something. The friend wasn’t just mad about the lie. She was hurt by all the distance that had built up since. And my protagonist had to sit with the fact that she’d created that distance herself. Not because she was a bad person. Because she was scared.

That felt true to me. More true than if I’d made her brave enough to tell the truth right away.

Why I Think This Works

I’ve been turning this over in my head, trying to figure out why letting characters mess up makes stories feel more alive. A few things come to mind.

Tension comes from choices, not just events. A storm hitting a town is an event. A character deciding not to evacuate because they’re too stubborn to admit they’re scared? That’s a choice. And choices have weight because they reveal who someone really is.

Readers connect through recognition. We’ve all made dumb decisions. We’ve all said the wrong thing, avoided the hard thing, chosen comfort over courage. When a character does the same, there’s this little spark of oh, I get it. Even if we disagree with the choice, we understand it.

Consequences create momentum. One bad choice leads to complications. Complications demand responses. Responses reveal more character. It’s like a chain reaction, and it keeps the story moving without needing external plot devices to force things forward.

The Hard Part: Sitting With Discomfort

Here’s what I’m still working on. It’s uncomfortable to let a character you like do something you don’t like.

There’s this voice in my head that says, but what if readers hate her now? What if they stop caring?

And I don’t have a perfect answer for that. But I’ve noticed something. The characters I remember most vividly from books I’ve loved aren’t the ones who always did the right thing. They’re the ones who felt real. Complicated. Sometimes frustrating.

I think readers can hold more than one feeling at once. They can be annoyed with a character and still invested in their story. Maybe even more invested, because now there’s something at stake. Will this person figure it out? Will they grow? Will they make it right?

That uncertainty is part of what makes fiction compelling.

A Small Exercise I’ve Been Trying

If you want to experiment with this, here’s something that’s been helping me.

Take a scene you’re working on. Find the moment where your character is about to make a decision. Then ask yourself: what’s the worst choice they could realistically make here? Not cartoonishly bad. Just human-bad.

Write that version. Notice what happens next.

You don’t have to keep it. But sometimes, letting the character stumble opens up story possibilities you didn’t know were there.

I did this with a side character recently. He was supposed to apologize in a scene, and I thought, what if he doesn’t? What if he’s too proud, too defensive, too convinced he was justified?

The scene got so much more interesting. Tense in a way I hadn’t expected. And it made me understand him better, because I had to figure out why he couldn’t bring himself to say sorry.

Still Figuring This Out

I’m not going to pretend I’ve mastered this. I still catch myself softening edges, making characters a little kinder or smarter than they’d realistically be in certain moments.

But I’m getting better at noticing when I’m doing it. And sometimes, when I notice, I choose to let the mess stay.

Because the mess is where the story lives, I think. The friction. The regret. The slow, awkward work of people trying to be better than their worst impulses and not always succeeding.

That’s the stuff that keeps me reading. And it’s the stuff I want to learn to write.

So. Have you ever let a character make a choice you didn’t want them to make? Did it change the story? I’d genuinely love to know. I’m still collecting data on this whole “letting characters be flawed” thing, and other writers’ experiences help more than any craft book I’ve found.