Perfect characters? You mean Edward Cullen? As mentioned, flawed characters are far more believable...although I do have urges to create flawed characters now and again. xD.
Be yourself; everybody else is already taken.
I came, I saw, I conquered.
When you're being nice to your character, you're being bad to your book.
It's hard to advance a story with a "perfect character".
It's hard for your readers to empathize with someone who is ridiculously perfect.
It's hard for their trials and tribulations to seem real or relevant in any kind of way. They're perfect. We know they'll get what they want. We don't care.
It's hard not to write them as two-dimensional.
It's hard for them to be any fun. Or have any fun.
Your character doesn't have to be evil or awful. They might even think they're perfect. Your character doesn't have to have huge moral dilemmas or be freakishly hideous, but the development into the way they are has to be plausible. Most of the people I know who are strong as people (not physically, but emotionally) have gone through troubled childhoods. Even "perfect" families are rarely perfect. I may find someone witty and smart and awesome but I definitely will also know twelve other people who think that same person is abrasive and annoying to be around.
It may be nice to write wish fulfillment stories (see: half the fanfiction ever written) but it's often transparent to your readers (see: Eragon) and an immediate turn off.
"He yanked himself free and fled to the kitchen where something huddled against the flooded windowpanes. It sighed and wept and tapped continually, and suddenly he was outside, staring in, the rain beating, the wind chilling him, and all the candle darkness inside lost."
Perfect characters is a confusing topic because you can define a perfect character as pretty much anything. You can have a perfect character for a certain role in a story. You wouldn't have a Joe Boring as your main character because most people like action (what action really is a completely different subject that you can go on about forever). So basically if you try to put the most perfect character in for that certain role so they can be considered perfect. Another kind of perfect character is the type that is the big macho handsome guy that everyone loves. I guess that he is a perfect character too. I think another definition of a perfect character is some one that is the reader's gateway into the story. It is usually someone is mistreated in some way and is used as a way to bring the reader almost perfectly into the story. It makes you care about the main character just like how most people care about themselves and it really puts you into the story. In my opinion Ender Wiggin is the most perfect character I can relate to for whatever reason. (Ender Wiggin is from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.)
I think that there is no such thing as a perfect character due to the fact that any perfect character will be despised by the reader:
For example, I was getting through the beginning of 'Bleak House', of which I had once watched a TV adaptation. It was really good, until I got to the part where Esther Summerson narrates. She was sooo... good, it was annoying. That's why I sort of gave up reading it, because the only way I could get through one paragraph was because I knew she was going to get smallpox later on.
So, since Esther was so good, I disliked her.
This is also a reason why I preferred Jacob Black to Edward Cullen in the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer; because Jake was actually more of a person with actual (however small) flaws, rather than a flawless rock.
So, to sum it up:
Perfect characters can be. They just are hated a bit.
Flawed characters can be. They are sympathized with. (Which is why Chekhov's The Seagull was so great; the angry Konstantin, the over-the-top Arkadina, the old Sorin, Masha with her drinking problem... Flawed the lot of them!) But not too flawed. That's my advice.
I, personally, enjoy creating perfect, god-modded characters, showing off their amazing Sue powers for three paragraphs, and then killing them in brutal, bloody ways. Then again I tend towards sadism against all of my characters, especially my protagonists. I *hate* protagonists. Well, villainous protagonists are alright, I suppose.
Anyway. Generally if I think my character's a Mary Sue I'll either kill 'em dead or torture them until they're not a Sue anymore. Or I'll just dump the story.
I dont ever have the urge to write about a perfect character, but somtimes I feel the need to have one in my story to show just how imperfect the viewpoint character is.
Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
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