By giving your protagonist flat traits, you’re taking away the opportunity for them to grow and learn throughout the course of your book.Įven though it would be nice if all of our friends were perfect and had no flaws, that’s simply not true. They remain one-dimensional and serve as nothing more than a means to move the plot forward.įlat characters are useful, but they’re somewhat limited. We still know Tiana’s mother loves her and wants the best for her, but her mother’s thoughts/desires are not revealed to us.Flat characters are those that do not change throughout the course of a novel.įlat characters never develop or grow. Her interactions with Tiana actually reveal more about Tiana than her mother. Her mother is a great character but we do not see much of her. In contrast, a flat character would have to be Tiana’ mother. We can easily identify this because we can see how complex Tiana’s overall character is. We’re able to see her inner thoughts, with lots of variety. An example of a round character would have to be Tiana from the Princess and the Frog. I believe I even learned about flat and “round characters when I was in grade school. I think this metaphor helps me explain what I would use to identify a flat character and it also gave me a new way of thinking about how to identify them. I love that Forster includes on the first page “One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized whenever they come in-recognized by the reader’s emotional eye, not by the visual eye, which merely notes the recurrence of a proper name.” I really like the distinction of the “visual” and “emotional” eye. I would think flat characters are simple and, like Forster said, easy to identify. Regarding round characters, phrases like “they have already been defined by implication and no more need be said.” are helpful when I try to identify them on my own. Honestly, I was not familiar with all of the examples Forster used but I was able to understand the majority of the point. I liked that Forster gave us examples throughout the text about different authors using “flat” and “round” characters. Forster, “Character” was insightful and pretty straightforward.
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