It's My Crypt Tonight

Everyone, no matter how tough or how fictional he or she is, has a weakness. For some, it may be a physical weakness or vulnerability. For others, it might be behavioral (e.g. too trusting of others) or something they’re no good at. Or, it could simply be something they’re powerless to resist, such as chocolate, or reality TV.

Achilles’ fatal flaw is legendary: Though the rest of him was impervious to pretty much everything, his heel was surprisingly vulnerable to poisoned arrows. Likewise, everyone knows Superman’s biggest weakness: people whose first and last name both start with the letter L (i.e. Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lex Luther, Louis L’Amour).

I believe the most amusing discovery of a character’s shortcomings may be from Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, when Officer Palumbo says, upon being shot: “Bullets! My only weakness! How did you know?”

For easy reference, I’ve compiled a short list of some other famous weaknesses:

Character(s)	Weakness(es)
Adam & Eve	Talking snakes
Green Lantern	Wood. Or the color yellow. Yes, seriously.
Humbert Humbert	Prepubescent girls
James Bond	Has his martinis shaken, which bruises the gin
Keanu Reeves	Emotion; can only convincingly pull off “Whoa.”
King Hippo	Leaves his stomach unguarded when he jabs
King Midas	Greed; everything he touches turns to mufflers
Marty McFly	Being compared to chickens. Or the color yellow.
Pedro Cerrano	Can’t hit a curveball
Pinky & the Brain	Where are they going to find a moose wearing rubber pants at this hour?
Sarah Palin	When mouth opens, words come out
Sherlock Holmes	The loving embrace of the neighborhood opium den
Vampires	Sunlight, garlic, crosses, holy water
Vampires (modern era)	Mopey teenage girls
Wicked Witch of the West	Personal hygiene.1

When it comes to writing, I know many of you liken me to a god, the way my words flow so effortlessly from my pen.² Not that I use a pen. Nor do the words so much flow as they spit and sputter, inconsistently and with great effort, like I’m summoning the dregs from the bottom of a liquid soap dispenser. Nevertheless, many of you put my work up on a pedestal.³

Yet I am not infallible. Last week, in fact, I learned my greatest weakness as a writer: Setting.

I can interject a sentence or two of description here and there to help highlight a scene's location, but anything beyond that and the writing becomes dull and stilted; the story crumbles. My strengths are in the characters, the action, the dialogue. For an exercise on setting for my writing workshop this past week, I tried writing three different stories five different ways, and came out with fifteen different pieces of crap. Each time, although I could picture the setting quite vividly in my own mind, on paper it read like a 6th grade book report. And not a good one.

I’ll work at it. Eventually, my descriptions of settings may become passable and enhance the other aspects of my writing. But the important thing is that I’m now fully aware of my weakness. Thus, until I get this chink in my armor buffed out, you likely won’t catch me writing any long, descriptive passages.

In other words, I’ll be keeping my Achilles’ heel far, far away from your poisonous arrows.


¹ That’s what happens when you can’t bathe and you surround yourself with monkeys.
² Some of you, on the other hand, liken me to lichen.
³ Up there, no one can read it.