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How much screen time should be devoted developing each char in a book/the cast's personality?
People always say they want real characters, characters that grow, etc. I'm all for character growth, but how much development do you really want to see in the characters you read about? It's hard to judge with the way fans exaggerate everything in posts and book reviews. It's hard to quantify phrases like "absolutely mindblowing" and "so real I could touch them".
In my writing, I focus on having interesting characters and character dynamics. I remember how much people loved the characters in Harry Potter and this threw me off because, in my eyes, JK Rowling developed most of her characters in a sort of light-touch way. I didn't think they were THAT developed. Otherwise the books would have ballooned in size. But you'd think that the stories had followed them intimately and and divulged their inner journies in all of their entirety from the way readers talked about the books.
So how real exactly should characters be? How much time should a book devote to characters' inner journeys, emotional issues, personalities, etc. for those characters in a book's cast to be good?
And I'm talking about ALL of the characters here, not just the main character, who naturally gets a disproportionate amount of "screen time".
1 Answer
- 8 years agoFavorite Answer
honestly that mostly depends on the author, how he/she desides where a character's backstory will intertwine with the current story. you dont exactly have to wrtie twenty pages expaling how one of the chracters had idk, lets say her parents died in a plane crash and she survived but has post tramatic stress. persoanlly, i would like to incorperate what happen to the character by having what happen to her in other chracter dialouge or show it, like how she couldnt sleep and such. in writing, they say we have to 'SHOW' not 'TELL'. and it truly depends how the characters are being used. lets say you are going to kill of one of the characters, i usually like to have them think or say something that everyone can relate to to make them relateable. like, you could incorperate why the characters do something with what happend to them in the past and the reason for certain actions. the inner journeys, emotional issues, personalities are shown through the actions of a character as the book goes on. like at the begining a boy could watch these people fight over something, when in the end he'd be brave enough to be the peace maker. i'd like to think your character is really real when you belive a reader can put a charcter in a senario and guess what they would do in it like, ''oh, harry wouldnt let them fight. he'd break it up to make them see reason." read the person jackson books? well, you could just tell by the way person talks he's a laid back guy. and i think its a bit hard to do ALOT of character development in just one book. so i know this isnt much of an answer but the choice is up to you how much time to spend on it. dont go so into detail that it just bores people, but chaacter's personalities are shown, their problems are shown, their emotional issues are shown. good luck on your writing :)
