You see them in sports all the time — the athlete who makes the impossible look like a Tuesday. But I don't have to turn on the television to find them. I have them right in my own family.
Take my relative, the mechanic. I could bring this man an engine held together by rust, hope, and one very tired bolt, and say, “Something doesn't work.” That's it. That's all the information I give him. No diagnosis, no helpful details, just something doesn't work — which, as descriptions go, is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.
And he fixes it.
Not only does he fix it — the engine comes back better than before. It purrs. It practically sends thank-you notes. I'm fairly certain that if I brought him a toaster and said “something doesn't work,” it would come back capable of flight.
Then there's my skydiving instructor. Yes, I know. I hear you laughing from here. But hear me out — if you ever watched this man in the air, you'd understand. Up there, in that big blue nothing, nobody can touch him. He moves through the sky the way the rest of us move through our own living rooms. It's grace. It's mastery. It's honestly a little unfair.
And I love these people. I truly do.
But here's the thing — I love them for two reasons. The first is obvious: they're brilliant at what they do, and brilliance is a joy to be around.
The second reason is a bit more... authorly.
They make magnificent characters.
Because here's the delicious secret about these one-thing wonders: the brilliance comes with a catch. A big one.
Don't ask them to do anything else.
Do not — and I cannot stress this enough — ask my mechanic relative to write an article. Or fill out an expense reimbursement form. The man can resurrect a dead engine with his bare hands, but hand him paperwork and you'll watch his soul quietly leave his body.
Don't ask my skydiving instructor to put together a PowerPoint. He won't. Not “he'll struggle with it.” He simply won't. He'll look at you the way a cat looks at a bathtub, and then he'll go jump out of a plane, because that, at least, makes sense to him.
And that — that beautiful, lopsided, gloriously human combination — is exactly what I want in my mysteries.
I want characters with shades. Black and white and every stripe of gray in between. The thing they do so well that nobody can beat them, sitting right next to the thing they absolutely, spectacularly, hilariously suck at.
Because a character who's good at everything? Boring. Nobody believes them, and worse, nobody likes them. But a character who can land a plane in a snowstorm and yet cannot, under any circumstances, be trusted to water a houseplant? Now that's somebody I want to spend three hundred pages with.
The brilliance makes us admire them. The flaws make us love them. And somewhere in the space between the two — that's where the story lives.
So that's what I believe makes a story awesome: not perfect people, but perfectly imperfect ones. The masters of one thing and the disasters of everything else.
Do you agree? Do you have one of these one-thing wonders in your own family — the genius with the golden hands and the allergy to paperwork? I'd love to hear about them. Tell me in the comments.
(Just don't ask them to write the comment themselves. You know how they are.)
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