Types of Characters in Fiction

"What does characterization do for a story? In a nutshell, it allows us to empathize with the protagonist and
secondary characters, and thus feel that what is happening to these people in the story is vicariously happening to
us; and it also gives us a sense of verisimilitude, or the semblance of living reality. An important part of
characterization is dialogue, for it is both spoken and inward dialogue that afford us the opportunity to see into
the characters' hearts and examine their motivations. In the best of stories, it is actually characterization that
moves the story along, because a compelling character in a difficult situation creates his or her own plot."

Karen Bernardo, Characterization in Literature

In fictional literature, authors use many different types of characters to tell their stories.
Different types of characters fulfill different roles in the narrative process, and with a little
bit of analysis, you can usually detect some or all of the types below.

 Major or central characters are vital to the development and resolution of the conflict.
In other words, the plot and resolution of conflict revolves around these characters.
 Minor characters serve to complement the major characters and help move the plot
events forward.
 Dynamic - A dynamic character is a person who changes over time, usually as a result of
resolving a central conflict or facing a major crisis. Most dynamic characters tend to be
central rather than peripheral characters, because resolving the conflict is the major
role of central characters.
 Static - A static character is someone who does not change over time; his or her
personality does not transform or evolve.
 Round - A rounded character is anyone who has a complex personality; he or she is often
portrayed as a conflicted and contradictory person.
 Flat - A flat character is the opposite of a round character. This literary personality is
notable for one kind of personality trait or characteristic.
 Stock - Stock characters are those types of characters who have become conventional
or stereotypical through repeated use in particular types of stories. Stock characters
are instantly recognizable to readers or audience members (e.g. the femme fatale, the
cynical but moral private eye, the mad scientist, the geeky boy with glasses, and the
faithful sidekick). Stock characters are normally one-dimensional flat characters, but
sometimes stock personalities are deeply conflicted, rounded characters (e.g. the
"Hamlet" type).
 Protagonist - The protagonist is the central person in a story, and is often referred to as
the story's main character. He or she (or they) is faced with a conflict that must be
resolved. The protagonist may not always be admirable (e.g. an anti-hero); nevertheless
s/he must command involvement on the part of the reader, or better yet, empathy.
  Antagonist - The antagonist is the character(s) (or situation) that represents the
opposition against which the protagonist must contend. In other words, the antagonist is
an obstacle that the protagonist must overcome.
 Anti-Hero - A major character, usually the protagonist, who lacks conventional nobility of
mind, and who struggles for values not deemed universally admirable. Duddy, in Mordecai
Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, is a classic anti-hero. He's vulgar,
manipulative and self-centered. Nevertheless, Duddy is the center of the story, and we
are drawn to the challenges he must overcome and the goals he seeks to achieve.
 Foil - A foil is any character (usually the antagonist or an important supporting character)
whose personal qualities contrast with another character (usually the protagonist). By
providing this contrast, we get to know more about the other character.
 Symbolic - A symbolic character is any major or minor character whose very existence
represents some major idea or aspect of society. For example, in Lord of the Flies, Piggy
is a symbol of both the rationality and physical weakness of modern civilization; Jack, on
the other hand, symbolizes the violent tendencies (the Id) that William Golding believes
is within human nature.

 Direct presentation (or characterization) - This refers to what the speaker or narrator
directly says or thinks about a character. In other words, in a direct characterization,
the reader is told what the character is like. When Dickens describes Scrooge like this:
"I present him to you: Ebenezer Scrooge....the most tightfisted hand at the grindstone,
Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!" -
this is very direct characterization!
 Indirect presentation (or characterization) - This refers to what the character says or
does. The reader then infers what the character is all about. This mimics how we
understand people in the real world, since we can't "get inside their heads". In other
words, in an indirect characterization, it's the reader who is obliged to figure out what
the character is like. And sometimes the reader will get it wrong.

Ten (Direct or Indirect) Ways in which a Character Can Be Revealed

a. By psychological description.
b. By physical description.
c. By probing what s/he thinks.
d. By what s/he says.
e. By how s/he says it.
f. By what s/he does.
g. By what others say about him or her.
h. By his or her environment.
i. By her reaction to others.
j. By his reaction to himself.

Things to Remember:

1. Literary characters may embody more than one of these character types at the same
time. A dynamic character may also be the antagonist, and a protagonist can also be, say,
a flat and stock character (i.e. the one-dimensional hero).

2. Here's a very common mistake: while characters are often round and dynamic, that does
not mean these two terms mean the same thing. The former refers to a character's
complexity, while the latter refers to a character's development over time. Students
also make this mistake with flat and static characters. 

Characterization or characterisation is the representation of persons (or

other beings or creatures) in narrative and dramatic works of art. This representation
may include direct methods like the attribution of qualities in description or commentary,
and indirect (or "dramatic") methods inviting readers to infer qualities from characters'
actions, dialogue, or appearance. Such a personage is called a character.[1] Character is a
literary element.[2]

And still speaking broadly…

 The Majors are also known as Round Characters.

 The Minors are known as Flat Characters.

We’ll cover how to create each one lower down. But first, let’s take a high-level look at the range of fictional
characters found in a typical novel, and run through some tips on how to handle each one during the novel
writing process.

Types of Fictional Characters

Not all characters in a novel are created equal. Some are important to the story and will demand a great deal of
your time and attention as you create them. Others might appear in just a single scene.

A typical novel contains dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of characters, though few of them will be significant
enough to command much of the writer’s time and attention.
In order of importance, there are four main types of character…

1. The Protagonist
2. Other Major Characters
3. Minor Characters
4. Extras

Let’s look at them one by one…

1. The Protagonist

This is your leading man or woman – the person the novel is “about,” or the character whose story lies at the
novel’s core. They are also known as the leading character, the central character, or the main character.

Novels can have two or more protagonists, though it’s generally better to stick to one if you can. Even if a novel
has several leading characters, all of them of seemingly equal importance, it is usually possible to single out one
of them as laying at the novel’s core.

Who they should be is usually obvious, right from the time you first come up with the idea for the novel. But if
your leading man or woman isn’t obvious to you, the following example should help you to make a decision.

Imagine you are writing a novel about a family: a father, a mother and their teenage son.

The father gets falsely arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, and the bulk of the novel is devoted to the court
case.

The story also concerns the mother and the son trying to hold things together back at home while the father is in
jail.

Who is the protagonist of this novel?

The answer, of course, is that it could be any of the characters…

 The father is the most obvious choice for a main character. He is the one who has been arrested, after
all, and whose liberty is at stake if he isn’t found innocent. All protagonists need a goal, and to
encounter opposition when trying to achieve that goal, and in the case of the father the goal is to prove
himself innocent with the help of his lawyer – not an easy task when he has obviously been framed.
 If you decide to make the wife the novel’s leading character, the story changes in nature. One of her
goals is to see her husband released, but there isn’t much she can actively do about this – and so the
court case aspect of the novel becomes more of a subplot. Her primary goal is to hold the family
together in her husband’s absence, and so the focus of the novel shifts from the legal side of things to the
domestic front, where the wife has to keep her son on the rails and also find a job so they can survive
financially.
 If you told the story from the son’s point of view, what would his goal be? It could be a million things,
but here is one idea: the boy sees himself as the man of the house now, and therefore the one who must
hold the family together while his father faces a hopeless-looking trial and his mother struggles to put
bread on the table. When he gets in with the wrong bunch of kids, the temptation to join their gang and
make some easy money from crime is too great to resist.

You can see, then, that who you choose as a novel’s protagonist will fundamentally alter the kind of novel you
write. Make one choice and your novel ends up one way, another choice and the book will be totally different.
So if you’ve come up with a bunch of characters but you’re unsure whose story to focus on, sketch out all the
possibilities, like I’ve done above, then go with your instincts.

If I were to write the novel above, I would make the wife the main character – for no better reason than her
story is the one that interests me the most. You might decide to go with the man or the boy, and you would be
just as right.

Alternatively, you could decide to make all three of them equal, giving them a third of the novel each in which
to be the viewpoint character and writing a multiple viewpoint novel.

As with a lot of things in novel writing, there’s no right or wrong here. The choices you make will be different
from the choices I make – but that’s what makes us artists, not fiction writing robots!

2. Other Major Characters

Like I said, major characters can be virtually indistinguishable from the protagonist…

 They will receive a large amount of “screen time”.

 They will possibly be the Viewpoint Character for significant chunks of the story – that is, they will
have chapters of their own to be the narrator.
 They will most likely have their own subplot.

The overall story will be “about” the protagonist, but the subplots – each of which should have a bearing on the
main plot – will be “about” one or other of the major characters.

What do I mean by a story or a plot being “about” a character?

Simply this: if a plot consists of a character struggling against some form of opposition to achieve a specific
goal, the character with the goal is the one the plot is “about”…

 The novel’s central plot will be about the protagonist.

 The subplots – which should be closely related to the main plot, weaving their way in and out of it – will
be about the major characters.

Needless to say, each of your major characters should receive virtually as much care and attention during the
planning process as your protagonist.

3. Minor Characters

Minors are the exact opposite of major characters…

 They will receive very little “screen time”.

 They are unlikely to be used as a viewpoint character.
 They won’t have their own subplots (at least not a subplot of any great length or significance).
 Their appearances in the novel will be brief and infrequent – although that doesn’t mean that they can’t
shine whenever they are in the spotlight.

Minors are essentially two-dimensional stereotypes, or flat characters, so there’s no need to spend much time
fleshing them out on paper before you begin to write.

A few broad brushstrokes will be all you need.

4. Extras

Just as a movie needs hundreds of extra characters for the crowd scenes, so too do novels.

If your character eats in a restaurant or walks down the street and there is no mention of the people around
them, the scene will lack realism.

The good news is that extras in novels aren’t really characters at all, more a part of the setting. They’re unlikely
to speak or even be named, and if they are singled out at all, they don’t need to be characterized so much as
“labelled”…

 a young girl clutching a doll

 a fat man reading a newspaper
 and so on.

And what all of that means is that extras don’t involve much work – hardly any, in fact. All you must remember
to do is to mention them, just as you would mention other aspects of the setting, like trees and motor cars and
what the weather is doing.

So if your central character is travelling on a bus, for example, don’t just describe the dirty windows and the
uncomfortable seats, describe the passengers, too, perhaps singling out the odd interesting one.

A Closer Look at Major and Minor Characters

Having described the four types of character, I can now reduce them to just two broad types: majors and
minors…

 The major characters are the small handful of principal players in your novel, the protagonist included.
 Everyone else – except for the extras, who really don’t count – will be minor characters.

In a nutshell, the single biggest difference between them is that major characters are three-dimensional and
minor characters only two-dimensional.

Or to put it another way, major characters are round characters and minors are flat. Let’s finish by looking at
each type in more detail…

It’s a common misconception that round characters are a good thing in novels and that flat characters (also
known as “cardboard” characters) are bad. The truth is that you need both types in a novel.

Creating Round Characters

“The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises it is
flat.”
– E. M. Forster

If flat characters are stereotypes defined by just a single trait – a “short-tempered businessman”, for example –
round characters are impossible to label in this way.

For every characteristic they have which places them into one pigeonhole, they have another which works
against it.
So if the businessman is a major character in your novel and one of his traits is his short temper, you could
counterbalance it by giving him, say, a love of ballet.

Whenever we meet anybody in real life, we’re all guilty of “categorizing” them, of thinking we know
everything about them based on our initial stereotypical impression of them.

When we actually spend some time with that person and get to know them, our initial impression (even if it was
accurate) will be altered by traits which work against this stereotypical view.

And it’s exactly the same with a three-dimensional character in a novel…

 first an initial impression

 then a process of having to revise our opinion as we get to learn surprising (but still believable) new
things about them.

How are round characters created?

Imagine that the short-tempered businessman is the protagonist in your novel. When you first introduce him,
don’t be afraid to concentrate on his stereotype – in fact, play it for all it’s worth…

The process of rounding him out will begin soon enough (in Chapter 2, in fact) but it’s good to begin with a
two-dimensional, yet vivid, portrait.

 So in Chapter 1, you could show him snapping at his chauffeur on his way into work, then barking
orders into his phone while he puffs away on a fat Montecristo cigar. The readers will believe that they
already know everything there is to know this guy: a rich businessman who has made it to the top of the
ladder by being a complete bastard.
 But then, in the next chapter, you show him swallowing some headache pills in his office, and suddenly
the readers aren’t so sure – maybe this guy is just acting grouchy because his head is killing him.

And so it continues…

As you show the readers the businessman’s mean side, his sweet side, his ruthless side, his loving side, and so
on, so his character becomes more and more rounded.

But it’s not just through a complexity of character traits that three-dimensional characters are made…

When you tell the readers about a character’s past, for example, and about what kind of future they see for
themselves, that adds dimension to their character, too.

Flat characters exist only in the present – their pasts and their dreams for the future aren’t mentioned. By giving
a round character a complete life, you make them more of a complete person.

What could you say about the businessman’s past?

 That he was bullied at school and now enjoys being in a position where he can bully others? Perhaps,
although it won’t make the readers feel sympathetic towards him.
 That he was the eldest of nine kids and had to learn to put bread on the table after his father drank
himself to death? Perhaps, but it’s kind of obvious, in that it somehow reinforces our stereotypical
impression of him.
  How about that he was hopeless at everything as a child, and that the only reason he became an
entrepreneur was that making a fast buck was the only thing he didn’t suck at? Yes, this not only gives
him a past, it has the additional advantage of unexpectedness.

Another thing which helps to add dimension to characters is motivation – specifically, the motivation behind
their goal in the novel…

Let’s say that our businessman’s primary goal is to find his illegitimate son. The question that we, as writers,
must provide good answers for is this: why does he want to find this boy? Is it so that he…

 can hand him the keys to his empire?

 can knock some sense into the boy?
 can tell him that he loves him?

Make it a little of all three and you’ll really have a round character on your hands!

Creating Flat Characters

“… flat characters are very useful to (the writer), since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not
to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere – little luminous discs of a pre-arranged size,
pushed hither and thither like counters…”
– E. M. Forster

Most of the characters you ever create will be flat. In a novel with a cast of dozens, perhaps even hundreds, only
a small handful can ever become rounded, three-dimensional characters.

The minor characters will all be flat – as a matter of fact, they must be two-dimensional.

Just because a fictional character is flat, though, doesn’t mean to say that he or she cannot stand out from the
crowd.

I’ll talk about how to make them memorable in a moment. But first let’s be clear about what these characters
are, exactly…

A two-dimensional character is essentially a stereotype…

 a rude shop assistant

 a cheerful paperboy
 the old lady next door who always has the TV up too loud.

They are defined by a single character trait – rudeness, cheerfulness, deafness – and we never get to know
anything more about them. Now, as readers of the novel in which these characters appear, we know that there
must be more depth to them than this…

 That the rude shop assistant volunteers at a soup kitchen on her days off, perhaps.
 That the cheerful paperboy is the school thug.
 That the old lady keeps the TV turned up to muffle the sound of her counterfeiting machine.

Such things would be the first step towards giving these characters greater dimension.
But because their role in the novel is minimal – just two or three brief appearances, perhaps – one or two brush
strokes is all that the storyteller needs to paint their picture.

How to Make Flat Characters Memorable

You won’t want all of your minor characters to be vivid. Most of them should be little more than extras. But it’s
a good idea to take one or two of your minor characters and make them stand out.

How? Through exaggeration. If flat characters are defined by a single character trait, simply take that trait and
magnify it tenfold.

For example, don’t just make the shop assistant rude to the customers, make her spectacularly rude…

 If a customer doesn’t wipe their feet, she has a go at them for traipsing mud through her shop.
 If they don’t have the right change, she sighs and curses under her breath as she rakes through the till.
 Anytime a customer wants help, it’s always too much trouble.
 Oh, and to really make sure that the reader won’t forget her, she always dresses totally in black and
wears an oversized crucifix.

Do everything you can to make her vivid, even comic – but don’t turn her into a round character.

Her stereotype is “rude shop assistant,” and that is how she must stay.

If you start adding depth to her character, by giving her traits which work against this type, the reader will
expect her to be a more significant character in the novel than she is – and they’ll be disappointed when they
never hear from her again.

Flat characters always act according to type and never surprise us. But that doesn’t mean they can’t steal the
occasional scene.

Making one or two of your minor characters really shine and stick in the readers’ minds is important.

Think of a favorite novel or movie and the odds are that there’ll be at least one character who really has little to
do in the story but nevertheless makes a vivid impression during their brief appearances.