There’s something to be said for a hero who is flawed but still superior, like the job candidate who confesses his major weakness is caring too much, but most contemporary novels are lead by characters with personality tics you won’t find on a resume.

When writing gurus talk about complicated characters, they start with tragedy in the back story, a blind spot or mental block, a weakness that the hero has to overcome before they can achieve the tangible story goal. In addition to relationships woes and external obstacles, they want the protagonist to suffer from some good ol’ stinkin’ thinkin’.

And that is what most readers want – characters who are good but not too good. They may have unrealized dreams or be in the midst of a setback. They might be financially strapped, put-upon, or unpopular or unloved. Any hero who begins a novel with an orderly life is guaranteed to hit a rough patch, usually of their own making. We like characters who make bad decisions or cave in to family or take the safe route, because they remind us of ourselves. And we like watching them succeed, because that means maybe we can too.

But some of us aren’t satisfied with 101-level complicated characters. We want the master class.

We want the Hot Mess.

A hot mess is more than a degree of difference from flawed characters. Flaws can be fixed. Backstory trauma can be healed or resolved. Weaknesses can be shored up or even turned into strengths. In contrast, the hot mess simply is.

The hot mess has a journey but no destination. Rather than dreams, the hot mess has questions that have no answers. What is life’s purpose? Why are people cruel to those they love? Where is my true home? Who am I? Is there more to life than this?

I like these characters because they feel more true to life. In the real world, there are no easy answers. We don’t get mentors and sidekicks, and we can’t wrap up a story problem in 300 pages. Life doesn’t present us with pitch perfect challenges that will help us overcome an emotional weakness so that we can make all our dreams come true. That’s fiction.

Earlier, I wrote about being ugly on the page, but messy does not mean emotional cruelty or selfishness, or portraying yourself in the worst light. It can mean those things, but a person or character can be kind-hearted, generous, and well-liked, and still be a complete disaster.

Rather, messy is an acknowledgment that humans are complicated, contradictory, and often unknowable. No matter how adamantly we believe we know our purpose and desires, life and our own badly attuned emotions can confuse us, undercut us, and lead us astray. At times, we may not know what to feel or which emotion should take precedence. On paper, our lives may look orderly and on-track, but inside, we feel tired, disoriented, or lost. We look for answers that can’t be found.

Anne Tyler is a master of messy characters. Her protagonists long to find meaning in life, but are trapped by inaction. They want love, but avoid connection. They prefer solitude but are drawn to strange company. Their stories eventually resolve, but the reader is often left feeling something is amiss. A protagonist shies away from happiness, or chooses to find love with someone they don’t particularly like. A character abandons his own path to embrace family tradition. The hero turns left when everything up to the final moment suggested that her path led right. I could have rolled through almost any of her books for this post, but I chose the following pair of semi-pseudo-autobiographical novels for a closer look.

In his 1963 novel City of Night, John Rechy fictionalizes the years he spent as a male prostitute in various U.S. cities, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New Orleans. An unflinching look at men residing in a sexual underground, City of Night follows an unnamed hustler through his encounters with various johns, including a sickly bed-ridden old man, a masochist, drag queens, handsome studs, other hustlers, and the occasional guy next door type.

Some of his relationships are recurring, most are fleeting, none provide for any serious emotional attachment. And yet throughout the novel, there is an undercurrent of longing, for self-knowledge, for connection, even as its characters arrange for anonymous encounters with men who can’t provide their real names, much less a morning after. An evening concludes, the bars close, but there are no real endings.

In the same way that the characters’ lives in 1950s America would be bifurcated – public/private, socially acceptable/transgressive, daylight/twilight – so too are their emotions and desires in conflict. They seek out beauty only to degrade it, they live in community but savage it, they act indifferent but crave approval. They want love, but can’t give it. They buy sex but want the happy ending. Towards the end, even the protagonist starts to yearn for emotional connection, or a bit of permanence, if not love and a home, and acknowledges the contradiction between how he’s lived and what he’s drifting towards.

Much of this is portrayed in subtext, so your mileage may vary. What I intuit from a character’s mannerisms, questions, or unspoken words may differ from your interpretation. We see what we see. But in the end, the men in City of Night are wandering, a bit lost, complex, and yes, messy.

This next book, by a lesbian writer, couldn’t be more different from City of Night, but it’s characters and their emotions are both terrible and complicated.

In Bastard Out of Carolina, the much-missed Dorothy Allison fictionalized her childhood, including sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, as well as her own early sexual experimentation and same-sex orientation. While any of those individual topics would be a lot for most writers to handle on the page, Allison’s juxtaposition of abuse and awakening, childhood and adult-sized trauma, create a tortuous emotional experience. Messy doesn’t start to cover it.

Main character Bone wants to love and please her stepfather, and can’t understand why she doesn’t, even before his abuse starts. As his violence escalates, Bone’s desire to love transforms into loathing, and yet she still looks inside for what has triggered her stepfather’s anger and made her its target. Bone loves her mother, yet is angered and confused that she does nothing to protect her child from the horror she’s married. She worships the men in her family who could and would rescue her, but maintains her silence to protect her mother. She’s confused and terrified by her stepfather’s molestation, but when she’s a little older, gleefully engages in self-exploration. She engages in bad behavior that she knows could trigger punishment at home, because she wants to impress her cousins.

You might feel a bit of whiplash as the tone shifts from scene to scene, but the overall effect rings true. Life – especially life under the constant threat of poverty, abandonment, and domestic violence – is jagged. It’s messy and Allison dredged from the deep end to bring Bone’s story – her story – to the page.

I don’t know if current editions of the book contain a trigger warning, but here you go: Allison does not hold back, either from describing the abuse or from depicting Bone’s confusing, contradictory, and oft-times impenetrable emotions and thoughts. A child, Bone doesn’t yet know herself, much less understand adult choices and relationships, nor can she navigate the labyrinth of domestic violence nearly breaks her.

And yet, Allison doesn’t wallow in her depiction of the abuse or Bone’s despair. Bastard Out of Carolina isn’t poverty porn and it doesn’t linger within scenes of Bone’s abuse a word longer than necessary. She’s no messier than she needs to be, a master class in rawness with restraint.

I like City of Night and Bastard Out of Carolina because they leave more questions than they answer. Rechy’s hustler doesn’t find love or even decide he wants it. He’ll have to stop prostituting himself some day, but not today. Where is he going? We don’t know and neither does he. No one can tell Bone why her mother repeatedly chooses her stepfather over her own daughter, even after she given full witness to the abuse. Bone doesn’t get resolution or healing. We aren’t privy to her mother’s thinking or her stepfather’s backstory. We don’t learn why people are cruel to those they love, because there is no answer to that question.

Both books are worth reading, though each is tough in its own way, as they explore complicated sexual dynamics. City of Night revels in grody underground anonymous gay sex encounters, while Bastard explores the tangled feelings of a girl whose natural adolescent sexual awakening occurs amid horrible physical and sexual abuse. But if you want to explore messy, complicated characters on the page, these are fascinating examples. And if you want something a bit gentler on the palate, try something by Anne Tyler. You can’t go wrong there.

Do you have questions without answers? Don’t be afraid of putting them on the page. You may find that your readers are as messy as you are.

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