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What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
~ Henry James
Writer's Block Activity to Create Dilemmas
Writer's Block Activity About Showing or Telling
Writer's Block Activity: Identify the Kind of Character
Writer's Block Activity to Build a Character With Five or More Traits
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A character is a person, or sometimes even an animal, who takes part in the action of a short story or other literary work.
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Goals, Aspirations : What does the main character want?
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Opposition or Dilemma: What is preventing the main character from achieving their goal? What is in jeopardy?
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History: What happened in the character's life before the beginning of the story? Every story has its own history and ideally the story starts in medias res (somewhere in the middle of things).
Techniques the writer uses to develop character:
Physical description Speech and actions of the character
Direct comment from the narrator
Speech and actions of other characters
To summarize: Authors have two major methods of presenting characters: showing and telling. Showing allows the author to present a character talking and acting, and lets the reader infer what kind of person the character is. In telling, the author intervenes to describe and sometimes evaluate the character for the reader.
Types of Characters:
- Protagonist: the main character in a work, who may be male or female, heroic or not heroic.
- Round characters: complex characters, often major characters, who can grow and change and "surprise convincingly"—that is, act in a way that you did not expect from what had gone before but now accept as possible, even probable, and "realistic."
- Stereotype: a characterization based on conscious or unconscious assumptions that some one aspect, such as gender, age, ethnic or national identity, religion, occupation, marital status, and so on are predictably accompanied by certain character traits, actions, even values.
- Stock character: one who appears in a number of stories or plays such as the cruel stepmother, the braggart, and so forth.
- Flat character: a fictional character, often but not always a minor character, who is relatively simple, who is presented as having few, though sometimes dominant, traits, and who thus does not change much in the course of a story.
- Foil: A character in a work whose behavior and values contrast with those of another character in order to highlight the distinctive temperament of that character (usually the protagonist). In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Laertes acts as a foil to Hamlet, because his willingness to act underscores Hamlet’s inability to do so.
- Antagonist: The character, force, or collection of forces in fiction or drama that opposes the protagonist and gives rise to the conflict of the story; an opponent of the protagonist, such as Claudius in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.
- Antihero: A protagonist who has the opposite of most of the traditional attributes of a hero. He or she may be bewildered, ineffectual, deluded, or merely pathetic. Often what antiheroes learn, if they learn anything at all, is that the world isolates them in an existence devoid of God and absolute values.
- Static character: Usually a minor figure who remains unchanged throughout a work.
- Dynamic character: A person who undergoes significant development or change during the story.
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