Writing Big Flat Characters in Fiction

Magwitch. Miss Haversham. Charlotte Bartlett. Ridgeway, the slave catcher in The Underground Railroad. Hilditch in William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey. The Mother in Eleanor Oliphant. These are all characters who propel a plot. In my own writing I used to shy away from big characters, finding them theatrical and cartoonish.

(Creating a Great Cast of Suspects for Your Mystery.)

But then one arrived in my pages in the character of the protagonist’s sister, based on my own sister. In my novel, she was a more flat-footed and demanding figure than the woman who inspired her, and she both challenged the protagonist and subverted her, all while maintaining a comic edge. She was also outright more fun to write than any of the other characters, and when she appeared an effervescent and yet bracing atmosphere pervaded. It was hard not to laugh aloud sometimes at the shockingly blunt things she said.

And I started to see that in life, too, there are outsized figures, people who loom large in our psyches, and who propel our own plots, goading and obsessing us, and inspiring our strongest passions, both intimately and on the national stage.

What do these figures have in common and how much ought they be allowed to contribute to a book? How can you best use a big flat character to press your own plots forward—without sacrificing the subtlety that makes a novel convincing?

E. M. Forster, who coined the term “flat characters” has a marvelous and profoundly useful one in his first novel. Her name is Harriet. The novel’s droll narrator describes her as “[A]crid, indissoluble, large; the same in Italy as in England – changing her disposition never, and her atmosphere under protest.

“Yet even Harriet was human, and the better for a little tea.”

In fact, Harriet exemplifies Forster’s definition of a flat character, about whom he says: “The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence such as ‘I never will desert Mr. Micawber.’ . . . [Such characters are] not changed by circumstances; they move . . . through circumstances, which gives them in retrospect a comforting quality, and preserves them when the book that produced them may decay.”

Which is why we remember Miss Haversham in Great Expectations long after the hero Pip and a whole caravansary of characters have vanished. In fact, as Forster notes, when we recall books, it’s usually the flat characters who appear, and we often regard them with a sort of affection since their weakness—their very consistency—makes them unthreatening, admirable, and dear. In Forster’s first novel, it is Harriet who turns the plot, (and by “turns the plot” I mean forces a resolution or at least kicks the conflict into a higher sphere).

A different flat character, Charles Wilcox, does something similar in Howards End. Just to show how this works, in that book Charles, in his typical full florid pompous patriarchal pique thrashes poor Leonard Bast with the sword that Forster—excuse me, the housekeeper—hung on the wall, thus precipitating the events that will at long last make his ever-guarded, emotionally cut-off father collapse his defenses and become worthy of his new wife, the heroine. In The Bluest Eye, Soaphead Church is a flat character with an exalted idea about his due and how justice should be rendered, and it’s through him that Pecola, at last, is granted the wish that is a curse.

What makes a flat character so useful as the wrench that pivots the bolt that turns the plot? Their steel. The fact they do not bend or compromise. And their ability to do the utterly unreasonable, although to them it usually makes perfect sense. Harriet in Where Angels Fear to Tread is the fool who rushes in, with catastrophic results. In my own novel (for it’s easier to get a feel for how this works when I think through the anatomy of my own book), the big sister—four-square, pitiless, plagued—is in fact the one person who is consistently honest, no matter the cost, in a world where others do what most of us do: tell white lies both to others and to ourselves. She functions the way Harriet does, the way Soaphead does, turning events.

In my novel Don’t Stop, the protagonist is having an affair. But there’s a way that she doesn’t allow herself to know she is having one. Her whole life with the boyfriend has a strange quality. This is the quality of the ideal, of wish-fulfilment, of a sort of celluloid transporting joy, a time out of time. Her real life, she believes, is with her husband. He is a good, decent man who pays rather more than his share of the bills. She met him when she was young. The boyfriend is someone she meets at the age of 41. And so the life in the boyfriend’s tiny and cigarette-smoke-infused apartment has an unreality to it, and feels like a kidnap, and the discoveries she makes there, the things she finds herself craving to do, seem to live there as well. She doesn’t know how to quit seeing him. And yet her life is falling apart. Enter Violet, the big sister, who doesn’t do anything as crass or obvious as telling the husband the truth. In fact, her idea is to help her younger sister get in life what Violet could not.

Do all novels need an instrumental flat character? Not if the protagonist is capable of such growth that they can make the turn by themselves. Many novels published now have characters who gain in wisdom incrementally, through the struggles that events put them through. Or they don’t, and then there is an interesting grueling dullness at the end, perhaps modernist in appeal.

Plot-driven novels, however, still often deploy flat characters since they are good at instigating the crisis. Yet while they help the plot along, they do not provide the resolution, which happens in the protagonist’s mind, or in the reader’s. Flat characters, too, have the advantage of being great fun to write—a fun that is often transmitted to the reader. And, as our public life these days attests, real life actually has plenty of them.

If you can’t think of how to propel the crisis of your book, why not look around and see if there is a flat character handy, or if you might flatten a character so they are of greater operational use, and notice what they force to the fore. There is, after all, a classic pleasure to the use of flat characters (most of the stories we tell our friends feature them), which is why they will always have a place, too, in books, providing memorable obstacles, and often embodying a principal that needs compromise in real life, however possibly good in the ideal.

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