How many Rounded characters are there in your novel

by Adrian Sroka
23rd February 2014

I have eight Rounded characters. One is the protagonist.

Replies

Both my stories are written from the POVs of two main characters, so their lives are well fleshed out initially. Obviously they're going to change over time, depending on the situations they find themselves in and how they react.

There's a secondary cast, including the main antagonists, whose characters are written only as far as necessary to understand their motivations within the episode, though since it's a series and a number of them will appear repeatedly, there's no real need to put in too much detail. This can be added in future as necessary. Some of these people have viewpoints too, when operating on their own rather than in the same scenes as the MCs, which means adding more detail so they're not simply cardboard cut-outs.

The amount of detail you need is sometimes difficult to get right. I quite like to build characters in my head when I read rather than have height, age, hair colour etc spelled out in the text. So I usually only include very vague descriptions of this sort, though I'd still class those characters as rounded. It'd be interesting to find out how many others work the same way.

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Jonathan Hopkins
23/02/2014