In contrast to these round characters, flat characters are more ‘two dimensional’: what you see is what you get. The same can be said for Charlie from Perks of Being a Wallflower, Kvothe from The Name of the Wind, and Jean Tannen from The Lies of Locke Lamora. However, in novels and fully-fleshed stories, I’d certainly argue that your protagonist should have more to them than the eye can see.Įxamples of round characters could be Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series, who has an individual background and personality that’s moulded by her past and present experiences. This does completely depend on what you’re writing– in some short stories and all flash fiction, you don’t have enough words to create that strong character (this isn’t a negative thing). So, clearly, protagonists should typically be round characters. I’m sure if you looked back, you could find dozens of incidents, major or seemingly insignificant, that helped you become who you are today. They should have a backstory and be moulded by it, shaped by the events that happened to them in the past as well as the ones going on in your story. We all come from different roots and no two people are the same– your character should be as individual as a real person. When reading your story, your reader should think that your round character could actually be a real person.īut how do you create a real person from scratch? Well, think about what real people have: strengths and weaknesses, instinctual differences, a backstory like no other person. That word, ‘people’, is crucial to creating a round character. I like to think of round characters as ‘three dimensional’: they have many different sides and parts of them that come together to make one shape, one person. In this article, I hope to show the difference between round and flat characters and help you decide which of the two your characters should be. How far should you go with your main protagonist? What about your sidekick, or the lady they run into at the bookstore? The notion of Round and Flat Characters should be known by every writer because, essentially, it helps you distinguish how much personality your individual characters should have. The idea is that there are two types of character in a novel, fully-fleshed and fully developed humans, and characters who have nothing to them except a singular trait or quality. Round and Flat Characters are a concept created by E.M Forster in his novel Aspects of the Novel (1927).
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