Even a rag like the National Enquirer becomes literature if you when quoting the text you properly wave and gesture your hands about with limber wrists and fingers... - Dame Edna
From the song "Shape of Things to Come":
Triangular is the piece of pie I eat to ease my sorrow
Triangular is the hatchet blade I plan to hide tomorrow
Triangular the relationship which now has ceased to be
And triangular is the garment thin
That fastens on with a safety pin
To a prize I had no ...
@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.
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 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 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.)
@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.
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.