In the Art of Fiction: The Art of Character Revelation by Christopher Mahon copyright 2003 All Rights Reserved

Let’s say you’re a guy who’s looking for a girl.

Let’s say a friend of yours comes up and says to you, "I’ve met a girl you might find interesting."

What do you say?

Do you say: "How has her character developed during the story of her life?"

Or do you say: "What’s she like?"

I submit that you would say, "What’s she like?"

And I would submit that, usually, we are more interested in what people are like than how their characters have developed during their lives.

I say this merely to reexamine the notion that character development is a crucial consideration in writing a novel.

I doesn’t have to be.

Character revelation is often enough.

This is not to knock character development.

Perhaps the greatest novel ever written, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, is deeply concerned with character development. Natasha. Prince Andrei. Bezukhov.

Of course, one of Tolstoy’s themes in that novel — if not the theme — is the greatness of the Russian people. And character development — as well as character revelation — is a key strategy in realizing that theme.

But not all novels are like Tolstoy’s.

The Sun Also Rises, I would argue, is not about character development.

Jake Barnes is pretty much Jake Barnes from beginning to end. His sensibility doesn’t change and neither does his character. He’s a marvelous character, beautifully revealed, but I don’t think he really develops — that is, significantly changes — as a character in that book.

The same is also true for Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby.

We learn a little bit about what Gatsby was like in his younger days, when he had a different name and a disciplined routine, but not so much that the information provides any grounds for a deep understanding of character development. In the beginning of the book, we meet Gatsby as he is and then we learn what happens to him when his character — as fully developed as it is ever going to get — meets the fateful circumstances of his life. (The novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, however, is another story … .)

To investigate a fully formed character, to reveal the dynamics of a fully formed character as he or she undergoes the challenges of his or her fictional life: that’s reason enough for a novel to exist. (A tragic flaw, after all, may be something that exists as an ever-present potential in a character, waiting to be activated, than it does as something that is developed over time.)

Even that supreme artist, James Joyce, called his homage to artistic release A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There is something about a portrait that never changes — like a character that is fully developed — even though your understanding of the portrait can change; even though your appreciation of it can deepen over time.

People often ask whether writers are born or made. Of course, it’s some combination of both. I usually come down on the side that says writers are born. The character of a writer is there from Day One. You don’t develop the character of a writer so much as you’re born with it. What you do develop is your talent.

So.

The point of this essay is simply to question clichés that surround us regarding the art of fiction writing. Fiction needs conflict. Characters have to develop — or significantly change — over the course of a story.

Perhaps.

And perhaps not.

Because conflict and character development do not always represent what life is about. And because writers and artists must explore life on terms we continually redefine — that work best for the stories we want to tell.

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