Haven't been on this website for ages...

Anyway, I'm trying to help someone understand more about creative writing and wanted to explain in very simple terms what it means to give character's depth or make them more rounded.

I'm working with a person who is very literal in the way they look at things, so I was looking for some practical examples of how you have given your character depth and prevented them being one-dimensional.

Obviously one of the ways to do this is to give them a flaw eg the detective with a drink problem.

Hi!
I have mafia boss lady who is hard as stone. But then her long lost daughter turns up and brings back glimpses of the ladies softness and vulnerability. The lady is a mix of killer/mother.

Yes, the quick trick is to give them a character flaw, which cuts against what you'd expect of a hero (though that, of course, becomes a cliché in itself.) Or some other kind of contradiction, like killer/mother or whatever. Of course, if that's properly conceived and explored, then it can stop being a quick trick and start being really fruitful

I think I'd be tempted to tackle this from the other end, but I am sooooo not here, but working, that I'll have to come back later...

Emma

An obvious one is to give them memories, a back story. I don't mean squodges of text about where they grew up and went to school - just the occasional memory of playing on their own on the doorstep with an empty milk bottle, or buttered brazils at Christmas, or being told off for having muddy shoes.

Rosy x

Sibelius,

I was writing about a really unpleasant character who from his actions appeared pretty irredeemable. However, I slipped in a bit about his Dad having deserted the family when the character was a boy & how his Mum was never there when he came home from school. My intention was to flesh him out a bit and give the reader a clue as to why he may have turned out the way he did.
In Great Expectations, the character Magwitch, who first appears almost like a monster in the novel, is given a similar childhood, hard-luck story by Dickens later in the book. If he were just a 'flat' baddie he would have been less interesting & the novel less successful. An example of a 'flat' character from the same novel is Orlick. He's pretty much the one-dimensional baddie. HTHs.

A lot can be done with dialogue, or things the character says, or is reported as having said... I remember Roddy Doyle uses a silly joke to good effect in "The Woman who Walked into Doors" - a wife beater and cruel bully makes the joke at one point, very unexpectedly, and this allows the reader to see a hidden side of him, a poignant glimpse of his lost capacity to be a good father and husband.

Frances

I think it helps to show how characters alter their behaviour depending on who they are with. So a character may be a model boss and a bully at home, or dull in public but hilarious with partner etc.

Yes, I was coming in to say that there's two different things going on - one, the background of the character, which colours how they behave in a general way: say, they're henpecked at home and a bully in the office, say. That manifests itself in how they behave to different people, but also voice and point of view: once you start digging around in how they talk and thing about things, characters start coming alive.

Emma

Thanks for the replies all. My challenge has been to explain this to someone who understands process, the nuts and bolts of things, practical applications etc. And I realised when I started talking about character depth, the explanations I was giving were quite esoteric.



<Added>

Forgot to say that I can explain quite easily how a character is created as a unique entity within a story by how they act, talk, move etc. But what I was struggling with was explaining - in simple terms - how writers prevent their characters from always being at that same pitch.

For example, say there is a character that is an angry man who suffers from small man syndrome and is going bald and walks in quick, hoppy strides and talks in staccato sentences.

Now, if every time he appears in the story he is displaying these particular characteristics, surely that becomes a little monotonal and means he lacks depth.