Welcome to June, an eventful month. My dog is turning twelve. Send birthday wishes.
Today’s Shelf Life is about building character. Like, building a really solid character. Built Chevy tough. A rock-solid character. But not just any character. Not your main character, no! Not your protagonist, antagonist, or love interest. This is a Shelf Life on building three-dimensional supporting characters.
So, there’s nothing worse than a flat character. Well, that’s not true; there are lots of things worse than a flat character. Cancer, for instance. But as an aspect of storytelling, flat characters aren’t great.
A flat character, or a character who is “two-dimensional,” is one who:
Is simple and not complex;
Does not grow or develop throughout the story; and
Serves a limited or single purpose in the story.
A flat character is in contrast to a round, or “three-dimensional,” character; one who:
Is complex and has many
Undergoes change and develops throughout the story; and
Feels like a real person.
EM Forster—good old EM Forster!!—coined the terms flat and round characters in Aspects of the Novel, a collection of lectures Forster delivered at Cambridge in 1927 and highly recommended by Shelf Life for any writer to read. It has one chapter each on all the important aspects of the English-language novel (Forster also delivered exactly what it said on the tin) with two whole chapters devoted to character. Character is that important. That’s why we all have to have some.
Forster wrote that books must be peopled by a mix of both flat and round characters; and this is true. Every character can’t be a complex, multi-layered creation and an integral part of the novel. Some characters are going to be, like, the person running the check-in desk at the Super 8 the protagonist stops at at three in the morning. That character doesn’t have to have a complicated backstory. I mean, they can—but you probably shouldn’t write it into your story. If every single, solitary person who shows up in your story comes with a three-page dossier of information about their backstory, desires, goals, dreams, obstacles, weaknesses, and so on—readers will get exhausted. Writers too, probably.
Obviously, not all your characters can be flat. Some have to be round, including:
Protagonist(s)
Antagonist (the main one at least)
But that leaves the whole vast world of supporting characters in between, for which you, the writer, must decide:
Does this character need to be round, or can they be flat? And,
If this character must be round, how can I go about making them really, really round?
Like—all the way round. Kool-Aid Man round. Oh, yeah. Anyway, let’s talk about how to do both those things.
First, determine which of your characters can safely be—and in fact, should be—left flat. This list should include:
Any character who shows up only once and for a limited amount of page-space (eg, one scene).
Any character who has limited page-space and serves a single purpose in the story (ie, character may appear multiple times but always in the same capacity).
Any character who can fulfill their purpose without being expanded past stereotypical details.
What I mean by this last bullet is not racial stereotypes, but stereotypes that encompass the type of character. For instance: Think about or picture a woman who works behind a perfume counter in a fancy department store. She is probably well-dressed (though her clothes may be suggestive of a uniform) and well-groomed, with well-executed makeup (many of these counters also sell cosmetics and skincare items). Her personality with customers is probably flirtatious (with men) and conspiratorial (with women). She’s very knowledgeable about the product she sells and maybe also about other designer or luxury items.
The above description doesn’t describe every perfume counter salesperson in the world, it’s just a stereotype. It’s not a good one or a bad one; it’s neutral.
If, in the course of a story, the protagonist shops for perfume and encounters such a salesperson—and that is the extent of the salesperson’s role in the story—then the stereotype of a perfume counter salesgirl will suffice for that role. The reader don’t also need to know that she’s putting herself through law school or that she’s a single mother with two kids or that she’s obsessed with politics and Akira Kurosawa movies. None of those things help this character fulfill her singular role in the story, which is to sell the protagonist some perfume.
If you have ever seen Love, Actually, think of the Mr Bean scene. Perfect flat character. Ideal.
If the same character appears multiple times but to fulfill the same role each time, a flat character will also do for that. For instance, if the protagonist eats at the same restaurant multiple times and always encounters the same server; if that server does not have a greater role to play in the story, then it’s fine for them to be flat.
Flat character is not an insult; having flat characters does not indicate bad writing. As long as the appropriate characters are flat.
Now—maybe I should have led with this?—characters come into a story one of two ways:
The character is already fully formed in the author’s mind and just needs a story to perform in; or
The story calls for a character the author doesn’t have on hand, and one must be created.
Item 2 is when you get to page 150 in your draft and you didn’t realize till just now that you need a mob boss or a landlady or a crack computer hacker or what have you. In this case, the author may scramble to get a character on the page and thus that character ends up feeling a bit like a paper doll—totally 2D.
What I am getting at is, if you—as the author in this scenario—didn’t have the character good and ready to drop into the story when needed, and you’re scrambling to put a character in there, you run the risk of the character being flat. This is much less likely to happen with characters you’ve already dreamed up before you really start grinding away on the story proper.
With any character that needs to be rounded off, and I’m not sure if they’re round (or round enough) to fit the bill, I go through this exercise to get them where they need to be.
First things first: Everyone is the hero of their own story. (This is what makes compelling villains.) Any character, however small or insignificant a part of the story they are, would be the hero of that story if they were the one telling it. So the first step is I ask myself: What would the story be if this character were telling it? If this character were the one whose point of view we were getting the story from, how would it be told differently? What things would be highlighted, that in the story, as currently told, are not? And conversely, what important parts of the story as it exists now would be sidebarred?
Imagine The Fellowship of the Ring but it’s told from Gandalf’s point of view instead of Frodo’s. It’s a very different story, right? It might still start in the Shire with Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday, but the story quickly diverges from the one you know. Gandalf heads to Isengard to seek Saruman’s counsel and finds himself imprisoned while Frodo escorts the ring to Rivendell. They reunite briefly and then Frodo’s off to Lothlorien while Gandalf is fighting the balrog to the death and having a heart-to-heart with his maker about Saruman’s dirty deeds.
This process will also illuminate for you what this character’s goals are and what the obstacles are that prevent this character from reaching their goals immediately. Round supporting characters have their own goals; they may align with the goals of the main characters but they are not identical. Gandalf and Frodo both want to see the ring destroyed, but they have different reasons. Frodo is mostly trying to put one foot in front of the other all the way to Mordor with the ring in his pocket while Gandalf’s goals have more to do with ensuring a whole string of prophecies get fulfilled in the meantime to make sure the ring actually can be destroyed when Frodo gets where he’s going.
After I’ve had a look at the whole story arc from my supporting character’s perspective, I do a little forward- and reverse-engineering to meet in the middle of a completed backstory with complex motivations. When I say forward-and-reverse, what I mean is, I sometimes start with the backstory and that informs the character I have. For instance:
This character underwent X trauma before the start of the story; therefore, he is bitter and angry.
On the other hand, sometimes I have a sketch of a character in my mind or I know what kind of character I need and I fill in the backstory from there to fit the bill. For instance, let’s say my protagonist is a happy-go-lucky type and I need a character to foil that, somebody with a bit of a storm cloud over their head, I might say:
This character is prickly and angry a lot of the time;
This is what I already know about the character, because it’s what the story demands. Then, I have to reverse engineer the reason for that:
Because prior to the start of the story, she had a massive falling out with the antagonist and she’s carrying a hue chip on her shoulder about it.
You can have a single-use character—a K-cup character—be angry and prickly and embittered for no reason. They can just be like that with no explanation. That is fine for a flat character. A round character, on the other hand, should reveal the reason for being the way they are—because that’s usually they key to how they will develop and change by the end of the story.
Finally, once I have imagined the story from this character’s point of view and figured out their backstory and motivations, I write a brief one- or two-page character sketch; essentially, a synopsis of this character encompassing:
Their backstory/situation up to and including the inciting incident;
An account of how they get pulled into the story;
Their character arc and how it maps to the plot I have already cooked up; and
The resolution for this character at the end of the story.
When I say one or two pages, I mean in my little notebook so they’re not even big pages (and my handwriting isn’t super small). This is just a couple of pages of a handwritten synopsis of this character’s story up to and through the plot of the story I’m going to tell.
During this exercise, I need to make sure I can understand why this character gets and stays involved in the story—that is, why doesn’t she just shrug it off and go home and let the protagonist worry about it? A supporting character should have sufficient motivation to participate in the plot so their role doesn’t feel forced. This is not necessary for a flat, single-serving character who just shows up to do their job or fill their singular role; they don’t need motivation to sustain their participation in the story.
Importantly, all the information you generate on your supporting character in your character sketch/synopsis should not make it into your final manuscript (read The First Law of Worldbuilding, which also includes token Tolkien talk). This is way too much information to give the reader. And it isn’t necessary. However, having the information—the knowledge of this character’s whys and wherefores—is what guides the author in writing this character’s actions and reactions so that they’re surprising to the reader, internally logical for the character, and make the character feel like a real person.
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