“I love the idea that every character you ever write has a secret they’re whispering to you. Sometimes those secrets are revealed to the reader.”
—Sherrie Flick
CHARACTERIZATION PRESENTS A challenge in writing flash fiction, especially if you’re the sort of writer who likes to delve into a character’s background, assemble lists of character traits, and put your character through personality tests. E. M. Forster laid out the conventional ground rules for such characterization in his famous book Aspects of the Novel. “Round characters” are fully dimensional, nuanced, and capable of surprise, he said, whereas “flat characters” are two-dimensional and relatively uncomplicated.
“Round characters” are deemed necessary in a novel, in particular, because the reader wants to have the full sense of a character,
