UK’s The Guardian has an interesting article on characters in novels; it essentially outlines the different schools of thought on ‘how to write a good character’, and the writer looks at a few of the heavyweights from classic English literature, finally reaching the conclusion that there isn’t really a formula for writing a successful fictional character (tell us something we don’t know).

But what I found really intriguing in this article was the sheer variety of characters and the ways they’ve all been formed. When you’re reading a novel, you don’t always pay attention to the way the words on a page merge to form the impression of a person, or a few different people, but this article has really interesting things to say about the ways this has been done. It’s all a little too complex to summarise, so you’ll just have to read it!