Or if you’re tossing and turning at night asking yourself other questions like: What makes a good character? Are my characters fleshed out enough? Are my characters likeable? Are they /relatable/? Enter your solution, character models!
Without further ado, the list of character models:
Characters that have a simple story, motivation, and set of distinguishing features. They usually fall into a set of cultural archetypes and have a black or white morality. This isn’t bad! Like ANY technique, this is just better suited to some stories more than others. Narratives which focus strongly on plot, theme and setting over character will usually have these. Fairy tales and children’s books will typically have them, since children find easier to understand, and thus more entertaining, /what/ is happening rather than who it is happening to. They're also common in comedies, as shorthand for real kinds of people.
Characters that are not meant to really act like normal people, but instead represent an idea or point of view. This can be very abstract, if a character represents hope or chaos, or more grounded. For example, characters in most political satires represent different parts of society or different political groups at the time. You could say there is kinda a scale between the Flat Character and the Representative one.
Usually someone out of her element, the Reader Stand-Ins largely exist for the reader to be able to understand and follow them through the story. Unlike Specified Characters, they usually don’t have many distinguishing traits or complex layers of their psyche that subtly influence them. They are often also young and inexperienced; to quote a post I saw once, “people get more specific as they age”. You may often see this in romance, so the reader can easily imagine herself with the super hot love interest, but this isn’t at all limited to romance books! A lot of classic western literature from the 1900s uses these as the protagonists. For example, Winston in 1984 is a reader stand-in. We know little about his life and he is meant to be the lens we view this insane world through. Since 1984 is a dystopia, it focuses heavily on its setting and theme, and to focus heavily on who winston is unrelated to living in an awful society would take away from that( And since this book is focused on a regime that has absolute control of people’s lives and the way they express themselves, it wouldn't make any sense for him to have a unique self-expression). For Reader Stand-Ins, we see their private moments and thought processes more than for Flat or Representative Characters, but I would argue this is to understand how the average person might react in this situation rather than /this/ specific character.
The most developed type of character, one who has idiosyncrasies and uniqueness in the way she acts. A reader learns to understand who she is and why she does what she does from her backstory. Generally their reactions are in the context of who they are as individuals rather than a window for the reader to look through, the way Reader Stand-Ins are. This doesn’t mean they are beyond empathy, but this empathy is meant to be more conditional based on who is reading and isn’t a foundational part of theme (or it could be). These ones handle the best with moral ambiguity as they can be complex without looking to the reader for approval and understanding.
Fuck no. One character could be several of these at once, especially if POV switches are in the narrative. She could appear flat or representative from another character’s POV, but in her own appear a Reader Stand-In or Specified Character. Or there could be some specific character model that I didn’t list here that your characters fit into.
First you gotta take into account what character models suit your story: