Short story writers use narrative characterization to create fully formed characters in moments. These can be round characters with complex motivations or flat characters that serve a specific purpose. Composite characters combine flat characters, while stock characters represent social ranks or jobs.
It has been said that all authors are mad because they can accommodate an infinite number of personalities within a brain. Authors who write novels have many pages to bring out those characters, and the time it takes for the reader to meet and get to know a character can unfold at a pace that is almost reminiscent of life. Writers who work in miniature, however, must use narrative characterization that allows the people in the story to leap to their feet, fully formed, in moments. Along with the use of these main characters, short story characterization types include the use of flat characters, composite characters, and stock characters.
Most short story characterizations include at least one or two characters who appear fully formed. While there’s no doubt a writer can’t reveal it all in a few pages, a character can seem to come to life, appear visually solid, and offer glimpses into a deep soul and reflective mind. These are sometimes referred to as round type because they can be perceived from any number of angles and remain substantial and believable. Round characters appear complex, with conflicting motivations or beliefs that pull them in more than one direction and make them do the things they do, or they can be singular and without conflict and therefore able to handle the chaos that comes to them from the surrounding action .
One of the things that short story writers often strip down is the number of characters. Creating an imaginary world in a handful of pages doesn’t allow much time for the characterization of a lot of tales in the form of fully developed walk-on parts. The author may need a point of view or attitude to be expressed succinctly in the body of a character that does not contribute much to the story. These characters are called flat characters because they are not meant to reveal, or even have, mysterious inner lives.
Sometimes the writer combines a number of flat characters into a composite representative of a short story’s characterization. For example, in William Faulkner’s finely crafted tale of elderly necrophilia, A Rose for Emily, the unnamed narrator symbolizes village life itself. There is only one narrator, but the narrator sounds sometimes feminine and sometimes masculine, changing as the story spans the decades of Miss Emily’s sad and long life.
Especially common in works of short fiction that are period pieces are stock characters. These are thought to be less representations of personality types than of social ranks or jobs. A waitress, a postman or a waiter serving to deliver coffee, mail or a visitor and nothing else will not receive subtle nuances from the author’s pen, either because there is no time or because doing so might distract from the action central .
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