Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

How to Write a Three-Dimensional Character

Your character is two dimensional. You need to write a three-dimensional character. These are the words we have all heard a dozen times. Various times throughout the Wattpad 101 book, I've written about how to write a better character. I've pointed out things that create two-dimensional characters and even pointed out when attempts to write three-dimensional characters only causes the creation of sometimes unbalanced and crazy characters such as the FIS.

But... just what is a two-dimensional character? How do you make a three-dimensional character? If you don't even know what you're looking for, how are you even expecting to fix it?

Unfortunately, this a really hard problem to solve. A three-dimensional character is a lot like porn. It comes in all shapes and sizes, but you know it when you see it. Everyone appreciates a character that has depth. But depth isn't the same things as being deep. You can write a shallow character who has depth. You can write a deep character who is shallow.

But let's take a step back and ask ourselves, what is this metaphorical pool we keep dipping all our characters in like an out-of-control apple bobbing competition?

Depth, or the lack there of, is merely an expression of how identifiable a character is. It is an arbitrary and unquantifiable measure of how much personality someone has. Mind you, this is personality in the sense of acting and responding to the environment they exist in, not personality in the sense that they are 'quite the character'.

You plunge too deep, and you end up with a nonsensical character like in Female Inconsistency Syndrome, a character screaming, whining, crying, laughing like some kind of strange monster that no one can understand. You plunge too shallowly, and you have a character that looks and acts like every other character in the book. It's a boring character, predictable, clichéd, and flat.

In vein with every other chapter I've written, let's make a list. Here are six pieces of advice (I don't math good.) on how to write a three-dimensional character.

1. Give them their own voice.

You'll quickly realize that most of these pieces of advice are redundant, albeit spread out over a dozen some chapters. As I discussed more in depth in previous chapters, no one talks alike. A teenager doesn't talk like an adult. An educated person doesn't talk like an uneducated person. And teenage girls... don't talk exactly like other teenage girls.

Yes, you don't need to be in a different demographic to talk differently. Every character has their own voice. It will help you in writing novels when you can differentiate each character by how they talk. At no point in your writing should you decide that "any character can say this but it needs to be said". Because that means that every character in your novel talks alike, thinks alike, and acts alike.

If that's the problem, chances are your characters are flat and boring. Every character should talk differently. And that difference should also occur within the same character in different circumstances. If your character is in distress, they should talk differently than when your character is joking around with friends.

There are cheap ways to create differentiation, as I mentioned before, web novels will often give a character who talks with a western drawl, or characters who will talk like a ninja. A good example to look at when you think of characters with unique voices is... sigh... my little pony.

Every pony is given an extreme personality, and also an extreme voice. It'd be very difficult to mix up the crazy ramblings of Pinkie pie with the ultra-competitive bluntness of Rainbow Dash or the southern girl charm of Applejack. Why yes, my daughter did just turn five, why do you ask?

However, talking can be more subtle than that. Someone can be angry, and that anger should come across in their implied tone of voice. Someone can be a really sarcastic person, or someone who speak in broken English, or someone who just doesn't speak much at all. There are many different ways to create characters with unique voices within your narrative.