Character Development in Fiction, From Forster to McKee

Character development is the work of building a fictional person and showing who they are, and often how they change, through the choices they make in the story. The phrase covers two jobs that are easy to confuse: the development you do before and while drafting (deciding what a character wants, fears and believes), and the development the reader sees on the page (the character acting on those things and being changed by them).

Most of the trouble with flat or unconvincing characters comes from doing the first job and skipping the second. A detailed backstory in your notes is not character development until it shows up as a decision in a scene.

What Does Character Development Mean?

It is worth separating the two senses, because advice on the subject usually blends them.

The third sense is the one people usually mean when they say a character "had great development". It is also the one that is optional. A detective in a long series can be thoroughly developed in the first two senses and barely change at all. If you want the shapes that change can take, the main kinds of character arc are covered separately.

What Is the Difference Between Characterisation and Character Development?

Robert McKee draws the most useful line in Story (1997). "Characterization is the sum of all observable qualities of a human being, everything knowable through careful scrutiny": age, job, way of speaking, clothes, habits. That surface is not the person. In his words: "True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure." He goes on: "the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature."

So characterisation is what a character looks like, and development is what they do when it costs them something. McKee then takes it one step further: "The finest writing not only reveals true character, but arcs or changes that inner nature, for better or worse, over the course of the telling."

The idea is far older than McKee. Aristotle, in the Poetics, defined character as "that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids" (Butcher's translation). Henry James made the same point about the novel in "The Art of Fiction" (1884): "What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?"

What Are Flat and Round Characters?

E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927) gave fiction its best-known test of a developed character. Flat characters, he wrote, "are constructed round a single idea or quality", and "the really flat character can be expressed in one sentence". His example is Mrs Micawber, summed up by "I never will desert Mr. Micawber."

Round characters pass a different test: "The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round."

Two things follow. First, flat is not an insult. Forster thought flat characters useful, because they are easily recognised and remembered, and most novels need some. Second, roundness is about depth, not change. A round character can end the book as they began it. Forster's test asks whether they can still surprise you.

The terms for change are different: a dynamic character changes over the story, and a static one does not. The two pairs cross. Scrooge is round and dynamic; a well-drawn series detective can be round and static; a comic sidekick is usually flat and static. Why static is not the same as flat, and when a character should stay put, is covered in the guide to static characters.

How Do You Develop a Character? Seven Techniques

1. Give them a want they can act on

A want is concrete and visible: win the case, find the sister, keep the farm. It gives the character something to do in every scene, and it gives you a way to put pressure on them. If a character wants nothing in particular, they can only react.

2. Give them a need they cannot see

The need is what would actually make them whole, and it usually works against the want. A man who wants to keep the farm may need to let his son leave it. The gap between want and need is where most character change happens, because the story forces the character to choose between them.

3. Give them a flaw or a false belief

A flaw is not a quirk. A fear of spiders is a quirk; a belief that asking for help is weakness is a flaw, because it makes the character choose badly when it matters. Write the belief down as a sentence. If you can, write the event that taught it to them. That is the useful part of a backstory.

4. Put them under pressure and make them choose

This is McKee's point, and it is the one that turns planning into development. Design scenes where the character must choose between two things they value, and raise the cost each time. The kinds of conflict you choose decide where that pressure comes from: another person, society, nature, or their own divided mind.

5. Show the change in action, not in summary

A line that says "she had learned to trust people" is a report. A scene where she hands over the keys she has guarded for two hundred pages is development. The usual advice to show rather than tell matters most here, at the moments where a character turns.

6. Give them a voice of their own

How a character talks is characterisation, but it carries development too. If the speech of a guarded character loosens over the book, readers notice the change before anyone names it. Read a character's lines on their own: could you tell who was speaking without the tag?

7. Keep them consistent, even when they are inconsistent

Aristotle asked for consistency in character, and added a useful exception: if the person is inconsistent, "still he must be consistently inconsistent." Change needs a cause the reader has seen. A character who reverses without reason is not developing; the author is moving them.

What Is an Example of Character Development?

The classic one is Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1843). Dickens opens with him as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!", nearly a flat character in Forster's sense. Each ghost then shows him a choice he made and its cost. Facing the last ghost, he says "I am not the man I was" and promises "I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year." In the final stave the narrator confirms it with action, not a verdict alone: he sends the turkey, raises Bob Cratchit's salary, and "became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew".

Want, pressure, choice, change, all in a short book. That is why it is taught so often.

A Worked Example

Here is the same character developed from notes to page.

The notes. Ruth runs a ferry across a river estuary. Want: keep the ferry running after the new bridge opens. Need: to stop treating the ferry as her late father's, and decide what she wants for herself. Flaw: she believes that letting anything go is a betrayal.

Scene one. A council officer offers her a job on the bridge's maintenance crew. She tears up the letter without reading the salary. (Want on display; flaw driving the choice.)

Scene two. The last regular passenger, an old man who crossed every Tuesday, tells her he will take the bridge from now on, because it is quicker for his knees. She charges him nothing and says nothing. (Pressure rising; the want is failing.)

Scene three. Storm damage closes the bridge for a week. The ferry is full again, and for seven days Ruth is happy. On the last crossing she finds herself working out how the bridge crew would have fixed the damage faster. (A crack in the belief, shown through what she notices, not what she says.)

Scene four. She sells the ferry to a heritage trust that will run it on Sundays, and applies for the job. On her first morning she walks across the bridge and looks down at the boat. (The choice under pressure. The change is in what she does.)

Four scenes, and nowhere does the story say "Ruth learned to let go." The reader watches it.

Character Development Worksheet

A full character profile template covers appearance, history and relationships. This shorter worksheet covers only the questions that drive development. Copy it for each major character.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT WORKSHEET

Name:
Role in the story:

1. What do they want, in one sentence they could say out loud?
2. What do they need, which they cannot yet see?
3. What false belief or flaw stands between the two?
4. Where did that belief come from? (one event, not a life story)
5. What is the worst thing that could happen to them?
6. Which choice in the story will cost them most?
7. Who in the story pushes hardest against their belief?
8. How do they talk under pressure? Write one line.
9. At the end, what do they do that they would not have done on page one?
10. Round or flat? Could they surprise the reader convincingly?

Question 7 is often answered by the antagonist. A good villain wants the opposite of what the hero needs and will not compromise, which is what forces the choice in question 6. The other people around your protagonist often fall into familiar roles such as mentor, ally and trickster; a role tells you what a character does for the story, and the worksheet tells you who they are.

Character Development Writing Prompts

Short exercises for when a character feels thin. Each one asks for a choice, not a description.

• Your character finds a wallet with cash and an address. Write the ten minutes after.
• Someone they love asks them to lie for them. Write the conversation.
• Give your character the thing they want, in chapter one. What goes wrong?
• Write a scene where your character is wrong, and is the last to realise it.
• Write your character at their most generous, then at their meanest. What links the two?
• Put your character in a room with the person they most need to apologise to. They may not apologise.
• Write the moment your character's false belief was born, as a scene, in under 500 words.

Most of these will never go into the book. Their job is to tell you how the character behaves under pressure, which is the information your scenes need.

How Do You Track Character Development in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app for Windows, macOS and Linux. Its Codex holds an entry for each character, and its Timeline can show one lane per character, so you can follow a person's path through the book.

1. Click Codex in the top bar. In the Characters section, use New entry and choose Blank (or a saved template).
2. Fill in the name, the Role, and the one-line summary. Add nicknames and titles under Also called, so every version of the name is found in the manuscript.
3. In Description, write who they are, what they want and what they are hiding. That is the prompt the box itself gives you.
4. Click Add fields to add the worksheet questions as fields, such as "Want", "Need" and "False belief", each with the Multi-line type. Use Save as Template on the entry to reuse the same fields for every major character.
5. Open the entry's Mentions tab to see every chapter that names the character, in manuscript order, with a count for each. Long gaps are worth a look: a character who vanishes for ten chapters cannot develop in them.
6. Click Timeline in the top bar. Add an event for each turning point, and in the Inspector pick the character under Linked characters/entities.
7. Set Lanes to your Characters section. Each character gets their own lane, and their turning points read left to right. Add a Born field to a Codex entry and the Timeline works out their age in every event they are linked to.

For checking that eye colour, ages and names stay consistent once the draft is long, see tracking character consistency. The Codex feature guide covers aliases, sections and templates in full.

Common Mistakes

• Mistaking a profile for development. A filled-in worksheet is preparation. Development is the character choosing on the page.
• Changing a character without a cause. If the reader has not seen the pressure, the change reads as authorial convenience.
• Changing everyone. Some characters should stay put. Forster's flat characters are useful precisely because they do not move.
• Telling the change. One scene of a changed action beats three paragraphs of reflection.
• A want with no cost. If the character can get what they want without giving anything up, nothing about them is tested.
• Backstory dumps. Use the one event that formed the belief, at the moment it matters, and leave the rest in your notes.

Sources

Retrieved 1 November 2026.

• E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), chapter IV, "People (continued)" (Project Gutenberg).
• Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (ReganBooks, 1997), chapter "Structure and Character" (archive.org).
• Aristotle, Poetics, chapters VI and XV, tr. S. H. Butcher (Project Gutenberg).
• Henry James, "The Art of Fiction" (1884), collected in Partial Portraits (1888) (Project Gutenberg).
• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843) (Project Gutenberg).
• Andrew Cowan, The Art of Writing Fiction (Longman, 2011) (archive.org).
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel, ed. Edmund Wilson (Scribner, 1941), notes (archive.org).