As a reader, you can feel the difference between a rounded and a flat character pretty quickly, even if you’re not sure why. Rounded characters are the ones you can picture having a conversation with, or walking down the street. They’re the ones with the power to make you feel—you might love or hate them, but whether you’re thrilled by their successes or infuriated with the decisions they make, the elicit real emotion when you read them on the page.

As a writer, figuring out how to create that kind of fully-realized character on the page isn’t quite so easy. But it is imperative to figure out if you want to truly immerse readers in the stories you tell…at least, most of the time. Let’s take a closer look at what makes a character three-dimensional, how to build that into your characters, and when you need to.

 

Traits of a rounded character

The short answer to “What makes a character rounded?” is easy: they’re characters that feel like real people. You can picture them moving around their world and can infer the values and beliefs that drive their actions, even if they’re not directly stated—and even if they occasionally still do things that surprise you.   

What gives characters that feeling of being real walking and breathing people? In my mind it comes down to 5 key things: 

Unique personal details

How someone looks, moves, talks, and dresses says a lot about who they are as a person. Granted, you do need to go beyond the physical to create a fully-realized character—but that doesn’t mean you should ignore the physical entirely. 

Giving your characters distinctive physical attributes is especially important in novels, novellas, or short stories with large casts of characters. The more unique the appearance of each character is, the easier it is for readers to tell them apart and keep track of each character’s individual arc and identity.

Some tips for adding unique personal details to characters:

• Go beyond the driver’s license details. One thing I see often from young writers is that they attempt to make characters unique by “anime-izing” them—giving them, say, blue hair, or purple eyes, but keeping the rest of their appearance basically the same as everyone else in the story. While that can still help to tell characters apart from each other (which is mostly how it’s used in anime), it doesn’t do much to show the reader who they are.
• Emphasize details that show the charater’s history. Every scar has a story. It might not be a very interesting or unique story, but something happened that left a permanent mark. Scars aren’t the only things that do this. The same is true of other remnants of injuries, such as a limp, or permanent marks like tattoos. More transient things can also show their history—a special piece of jewelry they always wear, for example.
• Use appearance details that drop other info at the same time. It’s always better when you can make a sentence pull double-duty, especially when it comes to descriptive passages. I’ll give the example here that some guitarists leave a single fingernail longer than the others that they use as a pick—that’s the kind of small, unique detail that makes a character 3D, and also tells you something about their interests. Characters’ profession, religion, cultural background, and socio-economic status can also impact how they dress and style themselves. Emphasizing those details shows the reader who the character is without you needing to tell them.

Psychological depth

Real people’s personalities are built over the course of years through lived experience. This is what I mean by psychological depth. People’s beliefs, attitude, and behavior don’t just pop into place fully-formed. There’s a reason behind them, a history of when they started feeling that way or doing that thing and why. This reason may not be obvious on the surface or seem logical to an outside observer, but there’s a followable trail of cause and effect if you dig down into the traits of a real person’s personality. 

Now, that doesn’t mean you need to know every character’s whole life story. But knowing the “why” of their worldview and defining personality traits helps you make them feel more real because it adds that sense they lived a life before page 1. Psychological depth is also what allows characters to have internal conflicts that feel relatable and add another level of tension and energy to a story.

Clear desire, goal, or motivation

Humans, as a rule, are greedy creatures. We’re insatiable, always wanting what we don’t have, or more of what we do have, or unhappy with what we have now and trying to make it better—in short: humans want. That means characters need to want something, too, if they’re going to feel like real people. 

People’s motivations are often rooted in the same thing that give them psychological depth. It comes from their values, beliefs, and personal history. For example:

• Someone that grew up in poverty and is now driven by financial gain to make sure they’re never living in those conditions again
• Someone that became a doctor in order to find a cure for the disease their father died from
• Someone who values honesty and fairness deciding to blow the whistle on unethical practices in their workplace, even though it puts their career in jeopardy

A character who has clear desires or goals doesn’t just feel more real, but they’re also easier to write a story around. It creates natural points for conflict when things get in the way of that goal, or when their desires are at odds with someone else’s, or with society’s at large. 

Agency and capacity for growth

These two concepts are flip sides of the same coin, in my mind, because they’re both about characters engaging fully with their world:

• Agency is a character’s ability to make decisions and exert their will on the surrounding environment—basically their ability to be in control of their own actions and circumstances
• Capacity for growth means a character can make internal decisions and alter their own habits, actions, or thought patterns. They are capable of receiving input from the surrounding environment and acting on said input—basically their ability to be self-aware and respond to their surroundings

Real people aren’t static, and they don’t exist in a vacuum. We are constantly taking in information from the world around us and making decisions based on that info. For a character to feel fully-realized, they need to exhibit that same kind of awareness and engagement. 

Consistency

Yes, human beings will often do things that seem to contradict their beliefs, goals, or best interests. If you dig down into them, though, you’ll find there is some kind of internal logic. It could be they were acting on a higher motivation—going against their own best interest for the sake of a loved one, for example. Or it could be they’ve just had one of those growth moments mentioned above. Their views have shifted, and they’re now acting based on those new guiding values.

This is what I mean by consistency. It doesn’t mean that a rounded character needs to be predictable—in fact, it’s often the opposite; rounded characters can have complex motivations that make them act in ways that surprise the reader. When you dig down to the root of that action, though, you’ll see it has this kind of internal logic. The action is consistent with the character’s core identity, values, and worldview, the reader just didn’t know them well enough yet to realize it. 

Do all characters in fiction need to be rounded?

No. In fact, I’d argue that, not only is it overkill to fully flesh-out every single character, but it’s an actively bad move that can take away from the reader’s enjoyment and comprehension of the story. A big part of writing effective fiction is knowing where to send the reader’s focus. Which characters you make 3D versus which you leave flat is one of the ways you signal this. 

It can help to think of your stories like a video game. There are two core character types in a video game: playable characters and non-player characters, or NPCs. NPCs are there for a specific purpose: to set a quest, serve as an antagonist, provide information, or serve some other role in moving the gameplay forward. Playable characters are the ones that players get invested in. They’re also the ones with the agency, who decide where they go and when, maybe even make decisions that change the course of events, depending on what type of game you’re playing.

Now, there are plenty of NPCs from video games that are well-rounded characters in their own right—but they don’t need to be. They can simply be functional, and the player doesn’t need to be invested in them beyond that scene or place where they’re needed. And good thing, too—just imagine how long it would take to finish a playthrough of any RPG if you learned the entire backstory of every NPC you encounter along the way. 

This applies in other types of storytelling, too. The characters that need to be rounded are the ones you want the reader to care about or relate to. The rest can be rounded out just as much as is needed for the story. Sometimes, it is useful for the story to know the main antagonist’s motivations; other times it’s better if you don’t. This applies to smaller bit characters, too. Maybe there is something to be gained from knowing why that clerk works in a rest area gas station—but sometimes they can just be a face and a few lines of dialogue.

The truth is, it’s not set in stone. The narrator and/or protagonist are the characters most likely to be rounded in a well-told story, though even that’s not always the case. The best way I’ve found to decide how much of each character to develop is to try and see the story from the reader’s perspective. Think about what emotions and themes you’re trying to express, then identify which of your characters will convey those the best if you bring them fully to life on the page.

 

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