This is why we get the Fatal Family Photo - if an otherwise interchangeable Red Shirt takes the time to establish his hopes and dreams, it's obvious they're going to be dashed in the name of drama.Ĭharacters who start out flat can be fleshed out into Rounded Characters with Character Development, Hidden Depths and/or a Rescue From The Scrappy Heap. The Spear Carrier, the Red Shirt, the Bit Character may require a Flat Character, to prevent the reader from feeling cheated. Indeed, adding details to the character indicates to the audience that the character is to be important.
The fact that the cocktail waitress is a leukemia survivor who is working two shifts to pay off medical bills, all while trying to polish off her doctoral dissertation on Ming-era Mandarin poetry and squeeze out enough time to decide which of her three suitors will best be able to get along with her aging, beloved Pomeranian-Pug pup all comes under the heading of "too much information." By the time all that is related, the customer waiting for his drink has died of thirst. Character depth should be proportional to the character's importance to the story.
It might be simpler to just have a look at Characters As Device, to cut through all the fog of lit-crit jargon around characterization.īeing flat is not automatically bad. The scene with the pawnbroker consists of characters that are all so flat - other thieves selling things, the maid, the pawnbroker himself - that some productions of the book have dropped the entire scene, with little loss in the telling of the story. One example of a flat character is the pawnbroker in A Christmas Carol, who buys Ebineezer Scrooge's bed curtains from the maid who stole them while he was lying on his bed, freshly dead. Flat characters with just one defining trait are known as one-dimensional characters, while flat characters with a few more traits are two-dimensional characters. A flat character is one that only has the bare minimum number of characteristics necessary to make them interesting enough to carry off their purpose.
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