Relationships & Partners and Writing Skills Tips. (A Writing Advice Guide Book

Round Characters P2

Round Characters
The closest Forster comes to defining round characters is to say, "The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round." The very nature of round characters is encapsulated in the metaphor we use to describe them: They curve up and away from the flat page into three dimensions. They have different sides and aspects, unlike flat characters, who appear the same from every angle.
Round characters are also richer, deeper, more mysterious, and more unpredictable than flat characters. They can do all the things a fat character can do come vividly to life, be memorable and instantly recognizable, and be engaging and entertaining-but they can also surprise, delight, and disappoint us in the same way as real people.
Further, as Forster notes, they don't just surprise us, but they surprise us in a convincing way.
Flat characters can be surprising, but they provide the sort of mechanical surprise we find in a mystery or a spy novel, where a trustworthy character suddenly turns out to be the murderer or the double agent. Although this kind of a surprise can be effective, it also sometimes comes across as a kind of cheating, and our response can sometimes be a groan or a roll of the eyes. -Professor James Hynes. (Diehard Original Star Wars fans need to put this into their brains while watching sequel trilogies because the writers succeed when they made you complain about the lack of Rey's character depth and Po randomly supposing to fake his death in The Force Awakens. They were intent on making the audience uncomfortable as they were using flat characters. And they got you good and hard and rocked you to the rock so much so so you screamed out your hate. These writers were actually aware that their concepts would feel like cheating you if you have seen the Original Star Wars trilogy movies. Lol, the joke is actually on you Star Wars Sequel Triology haters! -Lumna10.)
In contrast, the kind of surprise we get from a round character should evoke both shock and the strong feeling of inevitability.
The reader thinks, "Of course! I should have seen that coming." When a round character surprises us, we're delighted or moved in ways that flat characters can't manage-by sudden acts of kindness or cruelty that we didn't expect but that we believe the moment we see them. Round characters can also break our hearts in ways that flat characters can't, by disappointing us in a lifelike way.
Round characters should be both surprising and inevitable so that whatever happens to them is probably the only way things could have turned out-not because of circumstance necessarily, but because their own complex, flawed natures drove them to it.
As mentioned in an earlier lecture, fictional people are different from real people because we can know what they're thinking, which is perhaps another definition of roundness. This is the case even if the writer never actually shows us what the character is thinking, as long as the potential for the writer to show us is present. By the same token, characters may be round as long as they have the potential to change, even if they never actually do. Some of the most heartbreaking people in fiction are rounded characters who, for whatever reason, lose their nerve or are defeated by circumstance.
The complexity or roundness of a character isn't necessarily defined entirely by psychology but can be defined by circumstances, as well.
Mrs. Dalloway is round because we are inside her mind at every moment, listening to her private thoughts. In a series of detective novels by Denise Mina, we see inside the mind of the main character, Paddy Meehan, but much of the richness of that character comes from her circumstances from Mina's skillful evocation of the dank, melancholy world of working-class Glasgow in the 1970s and 1980s.
-Professor James Hynes.