Creating characters in fiction writing

British spelling

"Characterisation requires a constant back-and-forth between the exterior events of the story and the inner life of the character." ~ David Corbett (2013) "The Art of Character: Creating Memorable Characters for Fiction, Film, and TV", p.41, Penguin

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The development of characterisation, (i.e. the characters that will appear in a fiction story) throughout history is fascinating. In the ancient world, it was writers adding knowledge they have learned from the sciences and other disciplines to create their characters.

Characters tell a story. But they also they tell about the evolution of the human being.

The ancient Greeks were famous for their tragedies. They made a character's downfall a consistent theme.

The anonymous writers in the Middle Ages showed lack of interest in individualised characterisation.

Knights and Ladies were idealised by the medieval authors in their romances. There was a change in the late Middle Ages. 

The impulse toward individualism reasserted itself in some of the most memorable characters in the history of literature found in the narrative poems by Dante and Chaucer.

By the early Renaissance, the four "humours" were incorporated into fiction writing. Characters were born having a choleric, melancholic, sanguine, or phlegmatic personality. 

In the same way, nowadays, other sciences like sociology, psychology, and genetics just to mention a few, have approached characterisation contributing to a wider view of characters. As a result, we have seen how characters have been influenced by the environment as well as by psychological matters.

Naturalist writers contributed by adding the scientific approaches of Charles Darwin and Cesane Lombroso to fictional characters. These characters were showing a view of human destiny determined by forces of heredity and environment that are beyond the individual's control.

In character evolution, those were the first steps before considering the Freudian psychology as a resource to add the unconscious motives of actions to the psyche of the characters.

Building the protagonist and the antagonist and the antihero is as important as development and motivation in any consideration of fictional characters. 

In short stories, characters are described as flat or round characters depending on the depth of detail the writers lavishes on them.

Characters can also be static or dynamic depending on how they change in the course of the story. A static or a dynamic character can determine the interest of the reader. 

A dynamic character is much more attractive, appealing than a static one, especially when building a main character.

Motivation may be supplied by the author's comments or in some other cases authors present a character's thoughts by using internal monologue. 

This is a method of narration like a soliloquy in drama, or stream of consciousness. It is a way used to duplicate raw sensory data in the same disordered state that the mind receives it in a normal situation.

All in all, with all the changes in the elements of fiction, characterisation has developed in parallel with the development of the human race, of a society in continuous change.

It will not be surprising to see how the fictional characters in the future will differ from the characters we create nowadays. 

With the advance of science and technology, and most recently, ChatGPT and other Generative AI applications, some new future characters and their roles in their stories may experience a different creation path becoming surprisingly different in essence from the classic ones we know and love. 

Yet, those characters will be amazingly similar to their classic counterparts in certain ways since it's from the existing characters where the inspiration (or deep learning) comes from.

For modern writers, characterisation is an element of fiction that is equal to plot or, even more important than plotting. What would a story be without characters?!

At the end of the day, we are all characters in the world's stage, performing a role and seeking for a happy ending.

In the future, I will touch on the topic of AI-generated characters after some experimentation. I'll discuss pros, cons, the good, the bad, and the ethics of using of AI in writing, and of course. AI ethics applied to fiction and non-fiction writing is something that every writing will have to learn about.