Flat Characters Versus Round Characters · 11:20am Oct 21st, 2014
Characters are the most important part of the vast majority of stories. Many people give out advice on how to create “original characters”, which is to say, a character of your own devising; however, things are not always so simple. In reality, any story which involves a character changing as a result of the plot, even if the character is not your own, involves some amount of character development, and as character development is what establishes a character in the first place, everyone who writes stories has done some degree of character creation.
That being said, creating an all-new character with nothing else to base on it can be intimidating for people, which is why many people will take or adapt existing characters and change them to suit their purposes. But someone must create characters of their own, so that others may rip them off borrow them. How do they do it? And indeed, why do we use some characters created by others instead of others?
The first thing to recognize is that all characters are a part of a story, and that their role in the story is the most important thing to establish. So what is it that the character is meant to accomplish in the story? What is their role in the story? Why does this character exist in the first place?
Once you know that, you should be able to answer the first very important question: Is this character going to play an important role in the story, or do they only play a peripheral role in one scene, or a very minor role in multiple scenes?
If the character is going to only play a peripheral role in one scene, or a very minor role in multiple scenes, you want to create a flat character. If the character is going to play an important role in the story, you probably want to create a round character.
Flat characters
A flat character may also be known as a two-dimensional character, static character, or background character. A flat character is, as the name suggests, flat; there isn't a whole lot to them. A lot of people think that flat characters are bad, but they're not; there's actually a very good reason that flat characters exist, and that is to add texture to the world in a way that doesn’t take you an enormous amount of time. Flat characters are primarily used for bit parts and as extras, but they may also appear in the place of characters who simply have no reason to change in response to the plot of the story.
In the case of a flat character, what they are defines them to a great extent. A flat character has some basic role – they might be a waitress, a fellow patient in the waiting room, a nurse sitting behind the desk who lets you into the hospital, a guard who a character needs to get around, or whatever else.
On top of what they are, a flat character will generally have a few quirks if they show up for more than a line or two. A quirk can be anything which differentiates the character from “just some random guy”. A quirk might be an accent, a verbal tic, an attitude, or something else. So you might have a young, nervous waitress who is taking orders for the first time, or a cranky older waitress who has been working here for years and doesn’t want to have to wait for you to make up your mind, or a waitress who had an argument earlier with another waitress and is spending the evening showing her up. All of these characters have some added texture, but you don’t really need to know much more about them – they can serve their purpose in the story assuming they’re only there to take your order and what have you.
These sorts of characters tend not to stick around in the story for very long or have much real importance to them. If they do represent some sort of barrier to the character, it is mostly via their existence in some way being a nuisance to them – a hall monitor might need to be avoided by the character, but unless the character interacts with them beyond sneaking past them, then only a little bit of their personality needs to be known. A clumsy waitress might spill something all over the character right before their dinner date, or a boss might fire a character at the start of a story, sending them on the search for another job, but unless the character really matters to the story, fleshing them out more than that is often a waste, and may well end up making them bland if you forget that they are not going to show up “on screen” long enough for a lot of things to come through – more subtle personality traits are likely to be lost on the reader if there is little time for them to be shown.
As implied by the name “static character”, a flat character isn’t developed over the course of the story – they don’t tend to change, and if they DO change, it is usually in some simple, obvious way (for instance, a character passes by a soldier bragging about how awesome going to war is going to be, then later pass by him lying bleeding in the trench sobbing about how he just wants to go home).
On rare occasion, a flat character may play a major role in a story, but usually, when this happens, the unchanging nature of the flat character is usually played either for laughs or for contrast. A character who never changes in response to really important things happening around them can be comical, because any normal person would react to these changing circumstances. Likewise, if a soldier is sent overseas, they might go through really unpleasant, mentally scarring circumstances, and then return home to their friends whose everyday life has been more or less the same as it was before the soldier’s departure.
Round characters
A round character may also be known as a dynamic character. At their core, a round character is an entire imaginary person. Most main and major characters in fiction are round characters, and almost all of the best ones are such.
While all characters exist to serve some sort of purpose, and therefore the “what” of a round character is very important to the story, when it comes to the character itself, who that character is is much more important than what they are. A round character is first and foremost defined by their personality and the way that they interact with the world around them. Whereas a minor character may be defined by their quirks, a major character has reasons for having the quirks that they have – there is some cause behind why they are grumpy or happy, there is rhyme and reason to what they do and why they do it. They have a past which influences their behavior in the present, and they have hopes, dreams, and goals, however minor or major they may be.
Going back to the example of the waitresses in the flat character section, if you were telling a story about a group of friends who went to a restaurant, then the waitresses would work just fine as flat characters - their sole purpose in existing in the scene is to add a bit of texture to it, and give the characters someone to play off of. If, however, the story was being told from the point of view of the waitresses, then the waitresses would need to be round characters; that new girl might be new to town, having come here to go to college. She really needs a job to help pay for her tuition, and is nervous that she is going to screw it up and lose it and not be able to pay and will have to return home to live with her parents as a failure. This is her first real job, and the first time she’s been away from home, and everything is new and exciting but also a little bit scary, and she is trying to put her best foot forward and be bubbly and friendly and maybe even a bit overhelpful because she’s heard horror stories about waitresses being fired after one complaint.
The older waitress is used to the newbies screwing things up for her, and she always has to apologize for them and cover for their mistakes because deep down inside, much as she despises them for screwing things up, she knows that it is important that they keep this job; a long time ago, she was in their place, but when she screwed up, no one helped her and so she wasn’t able to complete her education. Now she’s stuck working service jobs the rest of her life, unable to get a better job, and she doesn’t want these kids to be put in the same place, no matter how annoying it may be. When customers can't make up their minds about what they want, it makes trouble for everyone; things get slowed down, tables don't get cleared, other customers have to wait, and everyone gets more stressed out and more likely to make mistakes. Is it so much to ask that they read their menus instead of sitting around and talking for twenty minutes after they get seated?
The third waitress is naturally a competitive person, and doesn’t really have much empathy for the newbies; she always wants to show them the right way of doing things, because she clearly knows better than they do, and because she won’t lose her job or her hours to these upstarts, and certainly won't cover for their mistakes. Her husband had his hours cut recently, meaning that anything more than the bare necessities has to come out of what she pulls in from her job, but really, that doesn't matter; everyone has their own sob story, and if they can’t pull their own weight, then they deserve to lose their job and their hours to someone who does.
It is not necessary to write an entire biography on a round character, but it is important to get a good idea of who they are and what they want – the motivation behind their actions is very important, and they should have a logical reason to behave in the manner that they do. This is not to say that a flat character should behave illogically, but rather that they lack the necessity of deeper motivations – a flat character is created to accomplish some specific task in the story, while it is best to think about a round character as driving the flow of the story. It is important that whatever the characters do make sense in the light of how you have defined the character in question – if it is too obvious that the characters are all just puppets on strings to the reader, behaving in whatever arbitrary manner the plot demands, the reader is much more likely to lose interest and have their suspension of disbelief ruined. Because round characters show up in multiple scenes, inconsistencies in their behavior will stick out to the reader, and they cannot be specifically tailored to behave in a precise way in every single scene in the same way that a character which exists only for the scene in question can be.
So why aren’t all characters round? The primary reason is that creating a round character is a lot more work than creating a flat one; if a character only plays a minor role in the story, then you don’t really need to come up with a whole person there behind that very minor role, as that is a waste of time and effort which you could be spending on improving some other part of the story while the flat character does what they need to do. Secondly, a flat character, by being less well-defined, is more easily made to fill the needs of a specific scene than a round character; it is easy to make up a character whose sole purpose is to accomplish some story goal if they never need to show up again where their defined personality might prove to be a hinderance.
Misuse of character types
So why is this important? Well, the biggest reason that it is important to understand the distinction between these characters is to better understand when you might be using the wrong kind of character in the wrong kind of situation.
The worst mistake you can make is using a flat character when you need to be using a round character. Round characters are the most interesting kind of character because they’re imaginary people; they have personality and depth, and they are the characters who the reader can most connect with and understand because there is simply more meat to them. A flat character doesn’t really change much in response to the story, which makes the story lose its impact because it isn’t really affecting the character, and thus, by extension, it affects the reader less as well. Their lack of depth can make them boring, and when a flat character succeeds, because they didn’t really have to change to bring about their success, it feels like their success was predetermined. The fact that the character doesn’t really change much in response to their environment also means that the ability to tell stories with them is more limited because the character doesn’t change, thereby reducing the variety in the story and likely resulting in repetition after a while.
Flat characters make for very poor protagonists, or for characters who are put into a position where they are exposed to a lot of varied circumstances. A flat character as a protagonist or someone who otherwise needs to overcome problems on-screen is much more likely to come off as a Mary Sue because they already have what is necessary to ensure their success, and therefore the challenges in the story seem much less meaningful to them. On the other hand, a flat character might work just fine as a character’s boss or spouse, someone who isn’t directly involved in the primary action and who therefore doesn’t have to change in response to the plot – indeed, one common use of flat characters is to contrast them with the character, by showing just how much the action of the plot has changed the character while the flat character, who was unaffected by the plot, has remained the same.
Generally speaking, using a round character in the place of a flat character is much less disastrous. There are, however, two main dangers of doing so: distracting the reader, and failing to be interesting in a limited space.
The first, distracting the reader, isn’t a problem limited to round characters used as minor characters, but can also occur as a result of a flat character drawing too much attention to themselves. Fundamentally, while it is good for minor characters to add to the scene, if you present a character in a manner which results in the reader believing that the character is, in fact, important, they’re likely to assign importance to them and then be surprised when they don’t show up again or whatever was mentioned never really matters to the story. This can negatively impact their view of the story in a few ways; first off, it can lead them to be disappointed when the character or detail that they remembered never has any payoff, but secondly, it can actually reduce their engagement with the rest of the story as they remember unimportant details and consequently overlook actually important plot elements in search of what seemed important to them at the time. This is not to say that making a minor character interesting and engaging is a bad thing, but it should generally be clear that the character is, in fact, a minor character and not someone that we’re going to have to remember for the rest of the story as being something of importance.
The second seems strange at first; round characters have a lot more nuance and detail to them, so how can they fail to be interesting? The reason for this is that while round characters may have a lot more nuance and detail to them, they may also not really show it under all circumstances; a round character who stands in line behind the protagonist at the ATM may have their own world going on, but standing in line, they may just be another bland customer, another face in the crowd that doesn’t really do anything interesting. Flat characters, by being given obvious, straightforward quirks, may be more interesting and engaging in the moment because their quirks are specifically tailored to be shown off in the scene in question.
In the end, it is all about using the right tool for the right job.
Accidentally creating a flat character instead of a round one
The most common way that a writer ends up with a flat character in the place of a round one is when they do so inadvertently; they get an idea for a character in their head, but fail to recognize that what they’ve actually got in their head is the what of the character rather than the who. A flat character can be transformed into a round character by adding more detail to them, a history and a background, and by having them change in response to the plot, but if a character is conceived as a flat character it can be very easy to fall into the trap of making what they are overwhelm the who.
This is one of the reasons why characters who are special snowflakes – that is to say, characters who are of an unusual species, or otherwise strange in some sort of intrinsic manner – are most prone to ending up disliked by the audience. While these characters are not always Mary Sues, they frequently fall into the trap of focusing so much on what the character is that who the character is gets lost; their personality plays second fiddle to their unique or strange qualities, or simply draws so much attention to itself that their relatively bland personality is overlooked by the reader. Moreover, because what a character is is usually an unchanging quality, these characters can easily come off as being static rather than dynamic, and using whatever unique intrinsic qualities they have to overcome challenges instead of actually overcoming them as a person.
So what do you do to avoid this? In the end, it mostly comes down to keeping an eye on yourself and what you are doing. If you come up with a plot involving a set of three characters, but one of the characters was created soley so that the other two characters would have a third person to bounce ideas off of, it is important to make sure that the third character is actually a round character, and not a flat character you simply conceived of as a plot device but who doesn’t really contribute to the story in a meaningful manner, and instead comes off as shallow and not very interesting. If you come up with a plot starting with the idea of a character being of a specific race or having some other unusual quality, like being the only wizard in the world, you should take care to make sure that you’re actually thinking about the character’s personality, and that the character is actually working to overcome their challenges instead of simply allowing whatever intrinsic special trait they have to overwhelm all obstacles in their path without requiring real effort on their part.
2547057
Always a classic.
This was really intriguing and helpful, TD. I'm going to bookmark this for future reference.
Nicely put! Not much to add, but thanks for writing it out.
2547502
I'm glad you found it to be helpful!
It always surprises me how little this comes up when people discuss original characters; a great deal of the time, more experienced writers seem to take the idea that people know this intuitively for granted and jump into what is wrong with the character specifically rather than in a more general sense, and thus leave the person confused because they didn't actually tell them the "real rules", just corrected a specific problem.
2548009
You're welcome!
Clearly I need to write more stuff about this kind of thing.
I learned a lot about literary terms from playing tabletop roleplaying games and reading about how to construct characters there; some books had really good advice on how to create characters. One of the best was the Complete Book of Villains, all the way back in second edition AD&D, which was essentially entirely about how to build interesting characters and almost not at all about mechanics. Oddly, almost all of the good advice on how to build interesting characters seems to come from the point of view of the DM rather than players, which I've always found a bit weird; obviously the DM needs to know how to do this as well, but creating round characters for PCs is actually really, really important.
One of the best people I know at creating characters is Bribri, but, alas, he steadfastly refuses to write fanfiction, even though he has great ideas for it (and feeds me ideas for stories, or ways to make mine better).
That was extremely well put. Thank you for that. These are some wonderful things that I have always known, but have forgotten to use when I get to writing. It's always great to have a well compiled reference that can be used as a reminder of the important things.
Well done!
2547057
Genius!
Well said