1.B Major and Minor, Round and Flat Characters (CHR-1.AE)

A round character can contradict herself. She wants two incompatible things, says one thing and does another, changes her mind on page 200 about something she was sure of on page 20. That capacity to surprise you, while still feeling like one coherent person, is what roundness is made of. A flat character works the other way: the same gesture, the same phrase, the same single trait on every appearance, so you recognize her at a glance and she never costs you any interpretive work. Writers build flatness on purpose, usually through repetition of a tic, a catchphrase, or a single motive that never wavers across however many scenes the character gets.

Neither is a rough draft of the other. A flat character who never changes is doing a job: she is a fixed point against which you measure the people who do change. A minor character's unchanging phrase, repeated in a new and painful context, can reveal exactly how far a protagonist has traveled, precisely because the flat character stayed put. That is why flatness is a craft choice and not a failure the author would have fixed with more pages.

This connects directly to protagonists and foils, and to the question of which characters change and which refuse to. A foil is often flat on purpose, built to throw the protagonist's roundness into relief. And occasionally a writer breaks the pattern: hands a flat minor character one irreconcilable contradiction, and the flatness cracks open into something interior. When that happens, pay attention. A writer does not spend that move on a character who does not matter to the book's meaning.