Jane Austen and the worst character ever

I have a terrible fear of Fanny Price.

For those of you who may not have undergone the torturous (okay, okay, at least call it tedious) process of reading Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, let me tell you a little bit about Fanny Price:

She's worried about appearing rude or impatient.

She's "extremely civil."

She gets headaches from "nothing but the heat." She quite literally gets a headache from cutting roses for 45 minutes in the sun. And from walking.

She's ridiculously weak.

"The sudden change which Edmund's kindness had then occasioned made her hardly know how to support herself." C'MON.

"That he should forego any enjoyment on her account gave her pain." No, seriously.

"Every sort of exercise fatigues her so, Miss Crawford, except riding."

She tells a boy that she's glad they didn't perform a play, and then, since she had never said anything so angry before, "she trembled and blushed at her own daring."

"The sight of so many strangers threw her back into herself," but "she found herself occasionally called on to endure something worse. She was introduced here and there by her uncle, and forced to be spoken to, and to curtsy and speak again. This was a hard duty."

I think by this point you understand what I'm trying to say. To sum it up, Fanny Price is arguably the most dull, uninteresting, colorless character ever written—or at least she was, until Bella Swan swooped in and stole that title away.

If you MUST watch Mansfield Park, always choose the right.
You'll forever regret choosing the left.

Ever since Mansfield Park became one of the few books I returned to the library without finishing (claiming a spot along with Alice in Wonderland and ... nope, that's about it) I've been afraid of writing a Fanny Price. I never want to write a Fanny Price.

Fanny Price isn't the only literary character I've hated over the years. When I went through my LDS fiction phase back when I was 12ish, I ran across a couple of books that I absolutely loathed because of the main character. Characters who are too perfect are horrible, and yes—I'm always grateful when a too-perfect or an annoying character bites the dust. I feel like Thumb Wars' Loke Groundrunner when a fistfighter blows up the Stray Dog/Red Rooster/Swollen Ostrich pilot…

THANK YOU

I think writing a character people want you to kill would be terribly depressing, a la Maid Marion in the BBC Robin Hood (bless you, writers) or Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight (bless you too, writers). If Fanny Price had contracted some fatal fatigue disease and withered away to a boring, dry shell, I probably would've liked Mansfield Park more. Sad but true.

It's this depressing thought—"thanks for killing your character! The story is better without him/her!" that makes me worry, because I think I'm writing a Fanny Price.

OH, THE HORROR!

See, I'm trying to write a character who's a bit shy, a little timid, and who allows himself to be bullied for part of the story. And dagnabbit, he's turning into a character I would dislike. I obviously don't dislike him because he's mine, but if I were an unattached reader… I don't know…

I've been watching a boatload of Bollywood movies lately (Dil Bole Hadippa, guys – it's just like She's the Man, only with cricket… and dancing…) and I thought I had found the answer in Pyaar Impossible!, which is about a shy main character. I thought I could learn from the movie. Unfortunately, he got on my nerves within the first twenty minutes. I just wanted to yell at him. "Speak up! Stop letting people walk all over you! Be a man!"

So there's a challenge, and I want to know how other writers deal with it. Shy, timid people occur in real life, so how do you write about them in a way that keeps them endearing, relatable, and likable? How do you make the story worth reading when your character is sometimes less than interesting? Every single character can't be charismatic, outspoken, and forceful, because that would make every character the same. But how do you avoid walking into the boring/too perfect trap when going for an unobvious hero in a story? So many questions.

Hopefully I'm just being too picky. Hopefully my shy character doesn't annoy anyone else. Hopefully he's got more gumption than he appears to have thus far.

And hopefully I can avoid making the worst mistake of all…

Writing a Fanny Price.