He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Balzac

What does "fully human" mean?

@Knight Not flat. Characteristic of real life human nature. Not wooden.

@EddieKal Your first phrase "not flat" and last phrase "not wooden" are so iconic to your reply.

Only one week left in the Shahnameh topic challenge! Come to read this great Persian epic and learn the mythic history of Greater Iran.

@Knight In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster formulated a famous distinction between flat and round characters. Flat characters are "constructed around a single idea or quality", whereas round characters are multi-faceted and unpredictable.

"Flat" characters have a useful function — their simplicity means that they can be made memorable and distinctive, a useful feature when writing a novel with many characters. Dickens uses this technique very effectively. If you try to make all your characters fully rounded, you end up with something like Tolstoy or James where the complexities of character can overwhelm the story.

@GarethRees Ah, like Stryver!

Very flat, but extremely memorable

Adaptations of Tolstoy often simplify and flatten the characters so that the story is easier to follow: "Bolkonsky is crazy, Mary is plain, Dolokhov is fierce, Hélène is a slut, Anatole is hot, Marya is old-school, Sonya is good, Natasha is young, And Andrey isn't here"

@GarethRees To which book these characters belong?

Okay got it, War and Peace. Gareth even if I request the mods to delete it, it will still leave a notif on your profile coz I pinged you. Consider if there is a chance for not to get disturbed by my unresearched question.

@Knight War and Peace, I think

Oh

@Knight What is it that you would like to be deleted? (If you don't like the audio pings, check the black loudspeaker icon next to "all rooms" (top right).)

@Tsundoku The "To which book these characters belong", I think

@Tsundoku I pinged Gareth and then I found the answer by some google search, so I thought if I was creepy and disturbed the whole chat. To mend things I tried to express myself that even if I would request the mods to delete my message which asked "to which book..." then also Gareth would get a ping in his profile when gets online.

Asking questions about novels is perfectly OK. And in fact, you don't need to ask to delete one of your own messages (if that is what you want), since you can do that yourself. Also, I don't think another user gets the ping if you delete your message before they have actually seen it. (I apologise if I am still misreading what you are worried about.)

No you're not misreading me. I'm glad my behavior is not inappropriate this time and seems like two people talking.

:-)

@Knight I would have said "unflat" or "unwooden" if they were words. In fact "unwooden" may be a word just not in popular use.

@GarethRees This makes me wonder if James and Tolstoy kind of writing still has a place in the contemporary world

@EddieKal One look at Twilight tells me "no"

@EddieKal What you meant by "not wooden"? I think I didn't get it

@NorthLæraðr We are in post-Twilight I think. Or hopefully.

@Knight Check this out: allwritefictionadvice.blogspot.com/2013/05/…

@EddieKal You are never post-Twlight

@EddieKal Why do you say that?

@GarethRees I meant not if people still read them--of course many do--but if pieces of writing a la James/Tolstoy by contemporary writers still have a shot at being widely accepted. Just wondering if realist techniques are still relevant.

@EddieKal Big, realistic novels with many well-rounded characters like A Suitable Boy or Wolf Hall still seem to be popular

I have not read A Suitable Boy or Wolf Hall, but while Realist novels (i.e. from that specific movement) still believed in telling a story straight, modernism abandoned that. Later, some authors, for example the French nouveau roman, even called the concept of character into question. But that doesn't mean you can no longer adopt older conventions today.

@Tsundoku Have we ever been modern?