Character development in fiction writing

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

Characters tell a story. But they also tell us about the evolution of the human being, culture, and society. 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 towards 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 such as 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 and 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, the author 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, the future of the fictional characters and their roles in their stories and fictional world may experience a different creation path becoming surprisingly strange in essence from the classic characters we all know and love.

Yet, those characters will be amazingly similar to their classic counterparts in certain ways since it is from the existing characters in classic and modern literature where the inspiration or, should I say, deep learning from Large Language Models (LLMs) comes from. Those characters once imaged and created by human writers serve as a blueprint for future characters possibly created by an artificial writer.

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?! What would life be without us as characters improvising our own story!

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