The Holy Grail of characters, according to the internet, is the ‘rounded character’. We, as authors, must strive for a thoroughly realistic person, somebody complex and flawed and capable of surprising the reader at every turn. Sometimes, the demand is so overwhelming we start trying to make every character rounder and rounder, filling them up like balloons with virtues, vices, flaws, backstory, and more. To an extent, this tendency isn’t bad. Making your characters more like people, at least in principle, is often (though not always) a benefit to your story. All too easily, though, it can pass from beneficial to destructive. To avoid this fate, we must understand how characters exist in our minds, on the page, and in the reader’s mind. We must assess how they should appear in those three arenas for the part in the story they play (or the part they should play, which is ideally the same thing). Then, having put those two elements together, we can discern not only what level of complexity will benefit the story but what type of complexity it should be.

To You

Characters come in all sorts and sizes. Roughly speaking, though, the author’s perspective on them can be divided into three categories: developed, motivated, and mechanical. Of course, as with all things in writing, the lines are blurry, but the categories are workable nonetheless, distinguished in how they are written (‘mechanical’ from the other two) or in how they are designed (‘developed’ from the other two).

Mechanical characters are the simplest. They are there to play a role. To that end, they possess all the depth of a cardboard cut-out. They may have a single characteristic; they may be stereotypes; they may have a few aesthetic features. In the end, though, they are stagehands (functional characters, in terms of last week’s article). The sentry performs his duty; the soldier wields his sword; the waiter carries out the steak dinner and puts it on the table. They need no real motive; they are mechanical parts of the world, background. They are the reflection of all the people we see in the world without seeing, the people who afflict us with no realization of their deeper existence, who are their mechanical functions and nothing more.

Developed characters are the opposite extreme. Developed characters are the typical ‘round’ characters, possessed of conflicting motives, their characters a web of flaws and strengths, their actions born of the closest we human creators can get to reproducing the human mind. They often have backstories, even if the backstory is an intentional lack of history, an author-intended blank slate. For me, such characters have an ability to warp the story, particularly when I write the first draft. I can guide the general drift of the plot, but in a very real sense the plot grows out of applying my protagonist(s)- developed characters- to the world and seeing what they do in it, sometimes in ways that leave me in a bit of a pickle regarding the rest of the story. My experience is common, though not universal. Write long enough, and you’re liable to end up saying, “I didn’t know where Character A was going; he really surprised me with that one.” Fundamentally, though, a developed character is built out of a complex interaction of many different flaws and virtues and motives and beliefs and circumstances, the polar opposite of the mechanical character’s simplistic nature.¹

The motivated character sits in the valley between these two. The motivated character has a purpose in one hand and a motive in the other. He has a role to play in the plot;² that’s why he exists. He has a motivation, one possibly crossways or at odds with his ostensible role; that’s what makes him more than a bit character, gives him the facsimile of life the mechanical character generally lacks, makes him a person rather than a spectacle. These characters live on a wide spectrum. On the one end of the scale sits the character who has a role to play and a motive just barely peeking out past his mechanical function. On the other end of the scale the ‘motivated’ character starts to blur into the ‘developed’ character, gaining more complexity of motive and life, still put in place to fulfil a role but surpassing the boundaries of that role to have a measure of the developed character independence.

On the Page

This element of a character is the ‘how are they depicted’ part. This is a hideously complex topic, so all I’ll attempt is an overview.

The simplest path to showing character is the action-speech-thought triad. What a character does, what a character says, and what a character thinks will all form an integral part of the depiction. Each, of course, has its own strengths. In the simplest terms, action shows who a character really is; words show who a character thinks they are or who they want others to think they are; thoughts show who they are in their own perception or who they are in reality. Of course, these simplifications are over-simplifications. Actions can be deceptive, lacking context, or they can show who a character wants others to think they are- which is a facet of who they are, even if it’s only by their thoughts or words that you realize this motive. Speech can be sincere or weighty, possessing the same ability as action to show who a character really is, or it can be deceptive- an element of character, but one only understood in light of its context. Thoughts… well, consider your own head. Self-deception, self-ignorance, regular ignorance, desire, motivation, faith, theology, politics, relationship, emotion, habits, all these mingle in a magnificently complex medley that makes the ‘developed’ characters of novelists like Dostoyevsky³ so disturbingly human.

Other, more subtle or more indirect ways exist to show off your character. Implications- the combining of the testimony of two parts of their lives or of their traits with the world- can characterize with a nuance and speed which is startling indeed. Contradictions between two parts of their character- between their professed physical cowardice and their daredevil physical stunts, for instance- is a subset of this. Their interactions with other characters, meanwhile, will show a lot about them, as will how other characters view them. Relationships tell us a lot about people in real life, and they do the same in fiction. If Gandalf is wary of somebody, the implication is that there’s something about them to be wary of; if we replace Gandalf with a paranoid nervous wreck, though, we get an entirely different understanding of the situation.

The last type of depiction I’d like to get into is ‘archetype’. Characters can be communicated not merely by what they do and who they are but by who they remind the reader of. Sometimes this is unavoidable. If you’re writing a bearded wizard with a staff, you have to consider what relationship he has to the Gandalf character type. Is this wizard part of that archetype? A counter to it? A partial member? What about Merlin? While sometimes these associations are unwanted, properly harnessed they can be immensely powerful, allowing for characters to pop up out of the page with unexpected and sudden vividness because they borrow their character-capital off of other stories, off of the gestalt cultural understanding the reader (hopefully) has gained from reading or watching other narratives.

To the Reader

Communication has three parts- originator, content, and receiver. We’ve covered the first two; now comes the most unpredictable, the least controlled, the consequent: the reader. Obviously I can’t predict how a reader will react to a character in more than the most general terms. What this section is about, then, is about different ways a character can be understood from the reader’s perspective. One further proviso: I’m going to be talking about motivated and developed characters mostly; mechanical characters are simply definitionally too small for the difference between the two approaches to become apparent- though certain aspects of the second approach can be induced in mechanical characters to produce a greater vividness to them.⁴

A lot of this will sound familiar if you read this article, the first in the current mini-series.

The character can be understood as if from within or, in more general terms, by the assimilation and coordination of a vast swarm of intimate detail. Alternatively, the character can be understood from without, by means of intuition applied to a limited amount of knowledge. In the end, of course, every character will strike its own balance between these two.

For the first case, the character becomes known to the reader almost as the reader learned to know himself. The reader has an intimate knowledge of the character that is, in a finite world, only possible for a person to have of themselves- or for a person to have of an immensely simplified, immensely complex (for people have a lot of tangles to work through) facsimile of a person. For this, I must stress, actual internal access is not actually essential, though common. Knowing the character’s thoughts may help, but the qualifier of this is the depth and intimacy of the reader’s knowledge, not its form or origin.

For the second case, the character becomes known to the reader in a facsimile of how they learn of other people. They learn about this character at a remove, with a certain distance from them. If the author succeeds, though, they with these characters nonetheless experience what Koenig terms ‘sonder’- “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own….”.⁵ The massive complexity of this character is not so much stated or seen as intuited, expected, understood. He is, perhaps, the man you talk to once a week, for whom you have out of the scant few facts given to you assembled an entire internal life, for whom you have conceived a specific emotional empathy and expectation (and just like in real life, sometimes the reader’s assessment of the character is wrong, whether from the story’s internal evidence or compared to the author’s intent).

These approaches are not antithesis but parts of a spectrum. Some characters will fit into one category only, are not built to match the other category (I expect category two characters are more likely to be incompatible with category one than vice versa). Many, however, will sit in the middle, partly one and partly the other. As an author, your job is to look at both paths and consider which one you want to lean into and how, the intimacy of the depiction as well as its information density.

Conclusion

‘Character’ is a complex subject even before we actually deal with any actual characters. Understanding how we can understand our characters, how we can communicate them, and how people can receive that communication is important, though. Through such an understanding we can apply intentional care to our characters, improve our stories with care and discernment. Characters are, after all, immensely important. Did not God create a world full of characters? He made a world full of men and woman; he created a world of characters more complex than any man has ever conceived of (for we humans can’t even understand ourselves fully, let alone create a new iteration wholesale). Our stories then, in imitating His world, can only benefit from more carefully incorporating the characters which are to story what persons are to reality.

God bless

Footnotes

1 – The first developed character you meet in real life is yourself. Consider, if you’re willing to engage in some self-consciousness, how your understanding of yourself is vastly more complex- and more biased- than your understanding of the person you saw walking down the sidewalk last week.

2 – Character arcs are plot. They’re just plot that is about what’s inside the character instead of what’s outside.

3 – It will go in my epitaph that I spelled that correctly on my first try.

4 – Attaching the character to an archetype or literary type (I’ve used archetype to mean both in this) is a powerful tool for these mechanical characters to become more than mere props in the reader’s eyes, however shallow they may be from the writer’s viewpoint.

5 – Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Discovering this book was worth it for the neologism ‘sonder’ alone.