How to Fatten Up Your Characters
I wish I could start and end this post by simply saying your characters should eat more. But that would be incredible crass of me, considering this is not at all about how fat your characters are or how the very heteronormative, white Hollywood and book world also includes skinny-ass people and that you should fatten up your characters. It’s still your choice no matter what. Instead this is about fattening up your characters in a different way: adding more dimensions.
It doesn’t matter who you are, if you are a writer, you have struggled or worried that your characters, whether your main or side characters, are a real person, or just a stick figure. This is most heavily laid upon female characters as a whole but there are many instances where male characters are exactly the same way. But Female Characters tend to receive the brunt of whether they are real women or not.
The biggest thing however that I encounter is people putting a female character into a particular category. These categories were made even more real when I came across this flowchart earlier in the week. The flowchart top I completely agree with, if you follow these three things–Story, Flaws, and more than an Idea–you’ll discover you’ve actually made a character that is three-dimensional, regardless of gender.
It’s the rest of the chart that severely bugs me. After all a character can still be some of these stereotypes and a three-dimensional character. It’s when they are ONLY those things like only a damsel in distress and nothing more, that there is a problem. But the flowchart does bring up something else important.
What Does It Mean to be Three-dimensional?
From a mathematical standpoint, three-dimensional just means the amount of space you take up. If you can be measured upon three and only three different planes, or lines. It’s very simplistic in math, and so much more complicated when discussing people in three-dimensional space, especially fictional people. If it was simple enough to say, hey, your character should have three qualities about them to be three-dimensional then we’d all wipe our hands and be done. That’s why I didn’t say three-dimensional in the title. It’s not about making the characters in three dimensions. It’s about making them multi-dimensional, the same as a human. You want to be able to measure your characters on as many planes and axis as possible. They should have so many traits and dimensions to them that you can’t really even count all of them. So many that you are still discovering things about that character years down the line!
But how do you add the dimensions? Especially to a character that you’ve already made and realized they weren’t very dimensional, or even solely fit into one of the flowchart examples?
Adding on the Fat
Discovering the character you made just doesn’t have very much dimensions or ‘fat’ to them can definitely deflate you. But that doesn’t mean something can’t be done about that character. They may be one or two-dimensional now, but all it takes is a little cleaning up and you have a multi-dimensional character in no time. First, if your character falls into a trope or category rather easily then consider that character for a moment. Why are they this trope? What else has happened in their lives to lead them there?
The more questions you ask yourself about a certain character, the more you are likely to see that character’s full personality come out on the paper when you go to write them. If you just have a generic idea of who they are, such as what job they have or why they are in the story then you just won’t see much of that character’s true personality. So keep asking questions about your characters. Why do they do what they do? Answering these questions along the way, and maybe even incorporating some of those answers into the writing of the character is how you add-on that dimensional fat!
Going Beyond the Trope
When it comes to writing, the last thing you should be worrying about is whether your character fits a trope. Those are always going to exist and they exist not always because they are over-used (Which is a cliche) but because they are stereotypes. As much as even I hate stereotypes, they do exist because there are large amounts of people who fit them. The key with writing is not to just play into those tropes and stereotypes though. They may have one of those things apart of them, but it doesn’t define them! It’s possible to have a damsel in distress who also has their own life. They may be in distress now, but maybe during that entire time they had been learning to fight, or how to invent gadgets.
We’ve seen a number of these tropes flipped on their head, from characters like Fiona from Shrek, who is the characteristic damsel in distress but then also learned to fight while she was waiting to be rescued. Fairy tales in particular happen to be one of the most commonly flipped around tropes. People are re-inventing and rewriting fairy tales all the time, and with it they want to make it different and new, so we see tropes like even my ‘Little Red Fighting Hood’ who happens to be grown up and skilled at fighting. It doesn’t mean these are bad, or that you aren’t original with your work, it just means you need to make sure that isn’t all you are doing!
My Red Riding Hood isn’t just a fighter, she’s a bounty hunter, a lesbian, a magic user, and she has a great reputation throughout the land as being a badass, but then she’s also soft and sweet, and caring to her friends and even takes care of a baby fox along the way. She isn’t all masculine, because I didn’t want to praise masculinity, but she isn’t all fairy tale princess either. She’s a balance in between and that is what made her a character all on her own.
So pay attention to your characters, what they are doing, how they are acting. You can always go beyond the trope or stereotype and you’ll have more fun with it in the process! And don’t forget to keep fattening up those characters, that way they are nice and plump for readers to consume!
