Characters and complexity

One way and another, a lot of pixels get used talking about making “well-rounded” or complex characters.

I put “well-rounded” in scare quotes because it always makes me think of the advice I got in high school about being well-rounded – take many kinds of classes, try out for a sport or the school play, join different after-school clubs and activities … basically, give yourself a broad range of subjects and experiences to draw on. This does not seem to be what most people mean when they talk about well-rounded characters. (And in fact, many, many literary characters do not fit that description, which is kind of a shame.) In fiction, the term “well-rounded character” is most often used to describe a person who “seems real” because they have flaws and weaknesses as well as strengths; areas of ignorance or incompetence as well as specific talents and gifts; irrational fears or impossible dreams.

Most of the characters I have read who fit this kind of description most clearly don’t strike me as complex; they strike me as a desperate mish-mosh of traits, carefully designed to tick as many of those boxes as possible without a lot of thought given to how everything ought to fit together in a person. The box that these writers seem to spend the most time talking about is the “character flaw” box. There are lists and lists of possible flaws that “you can use in your characters,” ranging from “awkward” to “violent,” but very little on how one actually “uses” a “character flaw.” Especially since it’s often not clear whether the goal of giving the character a flaw in the first place is to make the character more realistic (since nobody’s perfect), or to make the character more relatable (since supposedly nobody can identify with a perfect character).

Faced with this problem, some writers go for the easy and obvious. They give their main character a “flaw” such as a stutter or a limp, that will hamper them in ways that are easy to depict on the page without having to think too hard. Or they give the character a personality trait that they’ll have to overcome, like shyness, and then write a couple of speeches into the story for the character to agonize about, or give the character a secret love interest that they’ll have to get up the courage to approach. These options can and do often work in particular story, but the easy-to-portray choice is problematic as a general solution.

The complexity of an individual character need not arise from a single “fatal flaw.” It can arise from a character facing difficult choices – and the choices can be difficult because of external factors or internal ones, or from a combination that makes the right choice (or the motivation for choosing one or the other) unclear, or from a straightforward temptation (especially if a “perfect” character unexpectedly and plausibly gives in to, say, the temptation to use the Universe Control Center to make everybody act the way they think good people should). Complexity can arise from a character second-guessing themselves or others based on the results (good or bad) of something they did, or from a conflict of values (externally, between the character’s values and those of the culture they’re in, or internally, between two values that mandate mutually exclusive actions in a particular situation).

But there’s another kind of character complexity that I don’t think I’ve ever seen addressed, and that’s the complex effect the reader gets from seeing all the characters in the story. This gets more obvious the more characters there are – lots of characters make it easier to see whether the writer is working with a strict good guys/bad guys setup, or whether things are more complicated than that.

One multiple-viewpoint story I read managed to do both things at the same time. The author was writing a multiple-viewpoint semi-historical account of a war, involving characters on both sides of the battlefield and both sides of the home front as viewpoints. The presentation of the war was ambiguous; there were honorable and dishonorable characters on both sides, characters who fought for love of their respective countries and characters who didn’t care about much except the glory and the loot. The presentation of the home front, on the other hand, was a clear-cut good-guys, bad guys situation – the nobility who stayed home rather than joining the military expedition were, to a man, venal, cowardly, and corrupt.

On the other hand, if the whole story has only two or three speaking parts, it’s usually harder to see the overall complexity. It’s like looking at three dots on a piece of paper and trying to figure out whether the picture is a circle, a square, or a sleeping cat. Although 1066 and All That sums up the complexity of the entire English Civil War in one telling description: “…the utterly memorable struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).”