Deeply Important

Author in Kobe, Japan 2007.

In life as in fiction there are two types of characters. A round character is the first type. A round character is usually the hero, the protagonists, and is the most likeable character with many admirable qualities. The round character in the simplest definition of it is that it is someone who has many qualities that make him or her become reliable and dependable.

A flat character is the second type.  A flat character is the minor character. It is someone with a one sidedness, photographic one dimensional character. It is a character that has the antithetical role in a story. The flat character is someone who has no admirable qualities. He is someone with no three dimensional views of the world.

“In Aspects of the Novel, [E.M.] Forster used the now famous term “flat” to describe the kind of character who is awarded a single, essential attribute, which is repeated without change as the person appears and reappears in a novel. Often such characters have a catch phrase or tagline or keyword…Forster is genially snobbish about flat characters, and wants to demote them, reserving the highest category for rounder, or fuller, characters. Flat characters cannot be tragic, he asserts; they need to be comic. Round characters surprise us each time they reappear; they are not flimsily theatrical; they combine well with other characters in conversation, “and draw one another out without seeming to do so.” Flat ones can’t surprise us, and are generally monochromatically histrionic” (Wood 2008: 127).

I am reminded that we should not be so worked up about characters. James Wood writes in How Fiction Works: “A great deal of nonsense is written every day about characters in fiction—from the side of those who believe too much in character and from the side of those who believe too little” (2008: 101).

From reading Wood’s How Fiction Works I am made aware of the importance of understanding the characters that I develop in a book. As a start I always thought of characters as life like, resemble real persons, and that I am familiar with them. Characters for me come in the form of those that I love and those that I don’t know much about. In a sense characters that I love and are important seem to live full lives.

I remember telling my students one day that as creators of characters they must be willing to destroy them if need be. That is hard for them to imagine. Creating memorable characters is easy, but killing them is hard. Come to think of it that is what fictional characters are supposed to be like. Not the ones who remain alive when their part in the story ends in tragedy.

“So the vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence, and even plain plausibility—let alone likeability—than with a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character’s actions are deeply important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters” (Wood 2008: 126).

My impression with the Wood’s analysis of Forster’s character types is that Wood makes us see how popular writers like Hardy, Dickens, Chekov, or even Shakespeare developed their characters. Forster had difficulty with the Dickens development of characters.

“But if by flatness we mean a character, often but not always a minor one, often but not always comic, who serves to illuminate an essential human truth or characteristic, then many of the most interesting characters are flat. I would be quite happy to abolish the very idea of “roundness” in characterization, because it tyrannizes us—readers, novelists, critics—with an impossible ideal. “Roundness” is impossible in fiction, because fictional characters, while very alive in their way, are not the same as real people (though, of course, there are many real people, in real life, who are quite flat and don’t seem very round—which I will come to). It is subtlety that matters—subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure—and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do. Forster’s division grandly privileges novels over short stories, since characters in stories rarely have the space to become “round”” (Wood 2008: 128).

“It is subtlety that matters—subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure—and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do.”  This is the key point. Characters have subtle features that are worth mentioning in a novel. These subtleties are those qualities the reader remembers of a character. Whether they are round or flat as in Forster’s description, characters must have subtleties that are sprinkled around in a pizza to make it what it is.

In real life there are characters that are flat as they come. They appear to talk too much, claim to know more, or speak about themselves as if no one else matters, but in real life are essentially flat characters. Even if they appear round they are really flat characters because their ignorance limits their level of understanding. Their existence is determined by their antithetical nature or the contradictions in what they say they know.

In this discussion on Forster and Wood’s perspectives on character and character development, I have invited subtlety to inform me on character perspectives. I don’t need to understand the existence of these characters as much as they don’t need to understand my existence. We exist because we are the creations of God, who designed each one of us in a subtle way to differentiate our individuality.

“Characters can be surprising, so that the reader is kept guessing what they’re going to do next. They can be completely predictable, so the reader can guess exactly what they’re likely to do. Writers make a choice, then, about what sort of characters they want and what function these characters will perform in the piece of fiction” (Granville 2010: 41-2).

So characterization is key to giving a story an edge. “Characterization is all the things writers do to build up the characters they want. Characterization is the process that transforms real-life people into characters in fiction…As a writer, you’re in the luxurious position of being able to take from life whatever you want, but to ignore life if you want to. You may find that a real person makes a good basis for a character but you only have to use the parts of that person that you want to. You can make up the rest, or combine elements from several real people to make one character” (Granville 2010: 42).

Developing all the characters using all the knowledge I gained from reading E.M. Forster, James Wood, and Kate Granville is critical for a great novel.