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.
2. Create Unique Quirks
I always give this advice with a bit of caution, because I've also seen it done horribly. It's the addition of a quirk. In the worst examples, it's usually some unfounded obsession with food like I covered in my food sex chapter. Oh, you didn't realize I wrote a food sex chapter? Yeah, it's in there somewhere, check it out. And that chapter points out that the "Tallahassee loves Twinkies" quirk that made Zombieland a funny movie just doesn't work every time.
Still, strange and unusual quirks work in differentiating a character from others. In a recent web novel I was reading, the MC was a guy who had been abused his whole life. He always wanted to be strong, so as a result, he had a fascination with muscles. This is used to hilarious effects as everyone thinks he's into muscles as a fetish, where he just has an appreciation for the muscular form. Other novels of similar themes typically knock on muscle-men, so it makes it more amusing that he's opposite of that.
I thought it was a nice touch. It added characterization because there is an actual reason he has this quirk. Having this quirk establishes the kind of person he is and where he came from. That is the power of a quirk. If you just make up something that makes no sense, like this guy likes to sniff his underarms when he sweats... that's just weird. However, make that same guy a self-serving narcissist, and suddenly you have a hilarious scene of this guy showing how much he is in love with himself.
Quirks, by themselves, will not create a three-dimensional character. However, they are the dressing by which a three-dimensional character can shine.
3. Always Exaggerate... but not too much
I've mentioned this before, but exaggeration is important when writing a story. I once used the example of play actors. Play actors have to act a certain way in plays. Since they are up on stage, they can't show subtle scenes where a single tear is squeezed out. Everything needs to be exaggerated. In movies, you can zoom up close, have the music swell, show a quivering lip... none of that works when the audience is 30 feet away watching you from one fixed perspective.
The same kind of problem occurs when you try to create characterization in a story. I suggested movies don't need to exaggerate as much... but they do still exaggerate. Every story does. The characters in your sitcoms and dramas do not act like characters in real life. That isn't always just bad writing. Sometimes, if you write how someone would really act, it's just plain boring. People are boring. So you need to exaggerate.
The reason behind this isn't just because normal is boring, but also because you don't have a lot of time to make an impression. You have a few hundred pages of your book to fill people in on a character. Therefore, that character needs to be slightly exaggerated. You might understand the kid next door is mischievous. Your dozens of encounters with him where he walked on your flowers, ate your strawberries and scared your cat told you that.
However, in a book, spending that amount of time and effort, engineering dozens of situations, just isn't possible. So, suddenly a character wears a mischievous smile, has a slingshot in his back pocket, and the first time we ever see him he is causing a complete disaster, the kind that would cause life-long grudges in real life is played as the norm in a story.
Exaggerate too much, and you end up with a caricature of a character. Not enough, and the subtlety is lost on your reader. Remember though, that this also is changed by your target audience. If you're writing a young adult book, you'll have a lot less time, and may need to depend on more exaggeration. If you're writing a 400,000-word epic, you'll have a lot more time and a lot more situations in order to build up just who your character is.
This is at least one of the reasons why characters in children's books tend to be so extreme. It's so the kids can catch on to their unique personality traits in a short period of time.
4. Add some 'out-of-character' moments.
So, you have an exaggerated character with a unique quirk and his own way of talking. That may give you a memorable character, but not a three dimensional one. If you want to start building dimensions, you're going to need a character that has moments where he doesn't act in character. This is more tricky advice because this can easily go wrong. People will write a character and then have that character act in a way that doesn't make sense.
What you need to do is trickier. You need a character to act out of character but still make sense within their own narrative. This involves creating layers of complexity in how your character thinks and acts. Of course, you need to have them think on their own. They need to have their reasons for doing things. They can have conflicting personality traits, of course. Their motivation should rarely be one thing.
Perhaps she loves him, but she also wants to be the daughter her father expects. Thus, instead of running away with him, she dumps him in the end. She had two things at ends, her love for her partner and her desire to make her dad happy, but rather than writing her as the victim of an evil parent trying to hold her down, we have her torn by the fact she's disappointing her father.
But how do you really know how your character is going to act? When is a point in which they can logically go 'out-of-character'? It should be simple... as long as you...
5. Define their morality.
A three-dimensional character has a reason. I have written an entire chapter on the moral question, and the main take away is that you should always think about what your character wants, why they want it, and what rules they play by. People might not play by the same rules, but everyone has certain rules they follow.
Maybe they act because they don't want to get in trouble. Maybe they act because they are scared. Maybe they act because they want to be seen as a good person. However, they act, there are motivations. Those motivations, as I stated before, are not a single thing. There are many motivations, some conflicting others.
And you know you're starting to see a three-dimensional character when they start doubting themselves. Their reasons don't always align, and like in real life, sometimes they are pulled in many different directions. Where they spend their time, and where they want to spend their time, are all influenced by what they believe, want, and do.
As a result...
6. Show the Characters questioning themselves
A two-dimensional character is as straight as an arrow. If their evil, then they were always evil. Remember the friend who joins the MC only to backstab them later in the story. Without rhyme or reason, just as the MC is at their worst, her face will twist, and she'll betray them, never feeling any feelings of remorse. If they are good, they always make the right decision. They will stick to friends through thick and thin.
But real people don't work that way. You have bad days. You have good days. They are conflicted, and they question their own actions for many reasons that aren't always clear.
This might not always be perfectly apparent, and admittedly, writing a character who agonizes over every choice they make might get redundant and annoying. Certainly, you can't write every character contemplating an action either. Some people are simply certain that what they are doing is right. But in the ends of it, a truly three-dimensional character, whatever they chose, whyever they chose it, ought to be affected by those choices.
7. Show Consequences
If you thought ahead, you might be wondering if there was a bullet point that said that a character needed to grow, change, evolve, or learn. I deliberately left this kind of advice out. This is because of two problems. One, not every story NEEDs to involve a character growing or changing. Two... it implies every story needs to follow some kind of formulaic learning of a lesson, and everyone is always evolving towards a strong, more complex form. That's not how evolution works. And that's not how stories always work either.
In short stories or stories that take place over only a few days, massive character growth doesn't really make any sense. In fact, I've had stories where people are making massive changes over a two to three day period, and it's just silly that some stories go to this extreme. It's a result of this misperception that a 'changing' character is a three-dimensional character. A character can change throughout a story and be absolutely flat. If their thought process, motivations, and desires are all driven by one single thing, and then another single thing causes them to change all that, they are just as flat and cookie cutter as the rest.
That is why I say that you need to show consequences, not show change. When someone close to you dies, it should have important and long term effects on the character. If it's brushed over in a single chapter, you might have a flat character. A three-dimensional character is a character who is part of their environment.
And I think that's really the brunt of it. When I was a kid, I used to go to the dentist, and he had these panel drawings on the walls. It'd be a cartoon character on a glass panel, and then a background behind it creating the complete image. It's a cool effect, but like most badly drawn cartoons, it looks exactly like it is, a character placed in front of an environment.
That character? They are not a part of the environment. Oh, you superimpose them. It looks pretty. But at no point is that environment touching that character, and at no point is that character truly altering that environment.
That's what a flat character is. A flat character is a character that exists outside of their environment. You plop him over the environment, give him things to do... and you can tell an interesting story that way, but it will always be flat and two dimensional.
Showing consequences, that's the trick to creating a 3D character. They need to be in their environment. The two need to be linked. The environment should affect the character and vice versa. So if you want a 3D character, you need to write a character that thinks past their own nose, who acts in reasonable but sometimes unpredictable ways, and who is actually affected by the story you put them in. If you can't make a character who isn't involved in their own story, how do you expect a reader to be?
There is no right way to create a 3D character. Depth is an arbitrary and hard to define thing, and everyone is going to have their own ideas. What you thought was a multidimensional, complex creation, someone else thought was clichéd and predictable. However, if you make that character involved, and impacted in the environment around them, you've gone a long way towards creating some of that depth.