Stop me if you've heard this or something like it before:

It's our imperfections that make each of us so special...

As corny and cliché as that sounds, it is true. Each of us experiences a different road in life that molds and shapes who we are and what we ultimately become.

That same idea should extend to your characters. There's no such thing as a perfect character. How boring would that be? They have, or should have, issues just like the rest of us. The inner conflicts of a character or the difficulties (or happiness, even) they face in their lives is what makes them well-rounded, interesting and compelling to your readers. Sometimes those things are as plain as day, but they don't always have to be, and they don't always have to be revealed right away. Hinting at an inner something with your character can entice your readers and make them want to know more, but how you lay the road to the reveal is very important.

As many of us prepare to embark on this year's NaNoWriMo, we've probably been diving deep into the things that will make our characters tick. One of the challenges for me is that I tend to think of the conflict or the trauma or the driving force first, then start to build the story around it, but I get so excited about the reveal that I tend to rush it rather than telling the story properly, then it blows up the whole story and I'm left with an incomplete work that I don't know how to finish or that has to be completely rewritten, because I didn't take the appropriate amount of time to lay the foundation properly.

Then there's the opposite side of that coin: the just-hurry-up-and-get-there-already aspect. This can happen if you meander too much through your character's inner workings. There's only so much inner-angst a reader can take before they get bored, or your character just becomes annoying, and that's something you never want. It's only happened to me once in my life as a reader, but when it happened, it was absolute and forever. I swore I would never pick up another book by that author, and that reading experience still irritates me to this day. What this author did was basically beat his characters like a bunch of dead horses, and by the end (which I never even got to), I didn't give a flying fig about any of them. It's the first time I ever threw a book into the trash.

So, don't be like that guy.

Be thoughtful about what drives and molds your characters, consider their imperfections and plot their reveal carefully, but don't overthink it or drag it out, and don't allow them to make your characters insufferable, otherwise your readers will throw up their hands up in frustration and you risk losing them for good.