I hate heroes. No. Let me be more precise. Heroes, in the conventional, modern sense, bore me. Classical ones are fine. But they are flawed, miserable doomed creatures, nothing like the too-perfect marionettes you meet on occasion today. If you're thinking about writing about one of those -- you know the kind, great teeth, perfect hair, indefatigable, always willing to pat small dogs on the head between saving people -- please stop for a moment and consider what you're doing.

Here are some of the characteristics heroic heros tend to have. They're...
<ul>
	<li>Handsome</li>
	<li>Decent</li>
	<li>Brave</li>
	<li>Invincible (and often seemingly incapable of noticing pain)</li>
</ul>
Are you yawning yet? I am. Children and people who move their lips when they read apart, who the hell wants to hang around goody-goodies like that?

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The ancients understood this problem intrinsically. From the outset they gave their heroes flaws. So Achilles came with his heel (and we all knew from the moment that came on the scene where his fate would one day lie). They also made them difficult human beings. Achilles was a bloodthirsty, bad-tempered maniac. The first two lines of the <em>Iliad</em> run...
<blockquote>Sing, Goddess, of the rage, of Peleus' son Achilles

the accursed rage, which brought pain to thousands of the Achaeans.</blockquote>
And that's just the beginning. In a little while he starts to get <em>really</em> mad.

Modern heroes try to pick up on the Achilles trick but it's often an afterthought. Superman was born in 1932. Kryptonite, his Achilles heel, first appeared in a radio play in 1942. But it wasn't until 1949 that the one thing that could kill Superman finally made its way into the comics. So for seventeen long years the guy was utterly invincible, bound to win every encounter in the end because no one could do him any serious harm. <em>Boring.</em>

In 1949, too, Joseph Campbell published a book called <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces" target="_blank">The Hero With A Thousand Faces</a></em> . This is a highly detailed and seemingly academic analysis of the heroic character through history and many different cultures. Campbell was a 'mythologist' (whatever the hell that is -- am I a 'storyologist'?) who also gave us the catchphrase 'follow your bliss'. He identified what he dubbed the 'monomyth', an archetypal journey followed by the average hero everywhere and summed it up as this...
<blockquote>A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.</blockquote>
Campbell's hero theory has been copied countless times since, in how-to-write books and even so-called story theory software. George Lucas used it to create the <em>Star Wars</em> cycle. Richard Adams was inspired by it when writing <em>Watership Down</em>. Many people believe that the Harry Potter books adhere to the Campbell theory so closely that J.K. Rowling must be a fan too, not that she's confessed to date.

Notice something? Campbell works if you're talking about space lords, rabbits and teenage wizards. Try to apply that theory to ordinary men and women and it falls apart. Yes, you can categorise some heroes like that, but they tend to be the kind who never quite manage to climb off the page of kiddies' books and enter the adult imagination. Superman before kryptonite, Achilles without his heel. Fine as far as it goes.

Campbell is one of those theories that wannabe authors try to absorb in order to find the secret to writing fiction. Good luck to them. They're gobbledegook to me. Is writing so complicated that it needs to be 'explained'? In code too? Nah...

The most intriguing characteristic of a real hero is something very simple. It lies not with a hero's strength but with his weakness, his fallibility, the revelation he's human after all. Not every reader likes this idea, of course. I once got one of those filthy idiotic so-called Amazon 'reviews' from a punter railing against a Costa book simply on the grounds that Nic was a 'bad detective who makes mistakes'. That reader wanted one of Campbell's heroes: the perfect good guy bringing evil to book. Costa certainly wants to do the latter, but he struggles quite often with defining precisely what evil actually is, and he fumbles things along the way. He's a mere mortal after all because that's the kind of fiction I write. I stoutly defend my Amazon correspondent's right to hunt for Superman in fiction but why he was looking for him in one of my books is beyond me.

Heroism in heroes is predictable and liable to induce yawns without something to add a little texture and interest to the mix. They would act like that, wouldn't they? Wouldn't you if you knew you were invincible and couldn't feel pain too?

What I find much more illuminating is heroism in ordinary people, people who don't think of themselves as heroic in the least yet discover an inner, unknown core of strength when some extraordinary situation demands it. There's a news story you read from time to time that sums this up. It's the one where someone jumps into a river to save a drowning child, or a dog even, and dies in the attempt. Only later do we discover that they couldn't actually swim.

That says more to me about real human heroism -- the sense of self sacrifice, the hatred of seeing a life going to waste, the blind determination to do something whatever the cost -- than some bloke flying around in a cape and red underpants.

Here's what <em>Encyclopaedia Britannica</em> has to say on the subject of heroes. The second paragraph I find particularly illuminating.
<blockquote>...the hero's ethos seems oversimple by the standards of a later age. He is childlike in his boasting and rivalry, in his love of presents and rewards, and in his concern for his reputation. He is sometimes foolhardy and wrong-headed, risking his life—and the lives of others—for trifles. Roland, for instance, dies because he is too proud to sound his horn for help when he is overwhelmed in battle. Yet the hero still exerts an attraction for sophisticated readers and remains a seminal influence in literature.

The appearance of heroes in literature marks a revolution in thought that occurred when poets and their audiences turned their attention away from immortal gods to mortal men, who suffer pain and death, but in defiance of this live gallantly and fully, and create, through their own efforts, a moment's glory that survives in the memory of their descendants. They are the first human beings in literature, and the novelty of their experiences has a perennial freshness.</blockquote>
Makes a lot more sense than Campbell's psycho-babble. Heroes are about being human, not superhuman. It's their frailty and their flaws that make their journey worth following, not any magic bullet they may carry stuffed up their sleeve.