Here at GGV, where we publish specific fictional genres, we wanted to answer this question to better suit our authors on their journeys to crafting great fiction.
Understanding different types of fiction can lead to different types of character development. Thus, needing guidance on how to develop your characters within these types — dialectical and descriptive.
Dialectical Character Development
This development reveals your character’s personality traits through things like speech, thoughts, and interactions with other characters. This allows your reader to learn about this character organically.
With dialogue, this is how your character speaks, their tone of voice, and even specific words and phrasing choices they make.
In their internal monologue, this is how your character interprets their world and others and reflects on situations.
With their interactions with others, this is how you develop the behaviors and even how this character is perceived by readers/other characters.
This style of character development is really effective for a few different aspects of your book.
Show vs. tell writing style. This allows your reader to experience the story through words, subtext, conversations, and an overall viewpoint of interactions of characters.
Crafting authentic and human-feeling characters. This allows you to reveal their inner conflicts along with their interactions with other characters.
Creating character dynamics and relationships. Through conversations and internal thoughts, your characters will come alive on the page for your readers.
Descriptive Character Development
This style directly involves the writer telling the reader aspects of the character — what they look like, their character traits, their psychological profile, and background. This builds a character profile the reader can be certain of, since you are directly telling them about the character.
What are their physical traits? Mannerisms? What do they wear?
What are their personality traits? What is their nature?
What is their backstory? Past experiences?
This development is useful for other reasons.
Quick establishment of a character's basic traits and avoiding straying from the plot of your book.
Providing the necessary context and background information to help your reader understand why this plot is relevant.
Creating vivid pictures for readers to be able to fully immerse in their reading.
Do I have to pick just one?
Not at all! It’s important to understand the differences in how to fully develop your characters, but the most effective development can pull from both approaches while leaning heavily towards one.
What are some tips for being able to use these?
Start your character development by using the descriptive format in order to understand your character with the facts about them.
Use descriptive character development when you want to state the facts to your readers to build the foundation.
With dialectical elements, you can build depth to the characters, allow characters to reveal themselves through dialogue and action, and utilize internal monologues to give insight to motivations.
How can I practice this?
Let’s do a writing exercise.
Create a character profile using descriptive character development. What is their name, age, job title, and key personality traits?
Develop a short scene where your character interacts with another person. What does the dialogue reveal? What do the actions look like?
Where could you add descriptive elements in the scene to blend both developmental styles?
Practicing each developmental style separately and blended, you can equip yourself as an author to be able to craft wonderful novels that will surely draw in your readers.
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