Your job as an author is to make readers care about your story's plot, its world, and especially its characters. To achieve this, you may have been told to make your characters compelling, dynamic, realistic, and relatable - in short, to make your characters complex. But what does this actually mean?
Character complexity mirrors the grey areas of life, the inconsistencies, contradictions, and conflicting motivations people deal with every day. Like Shrek and Donkey argued, complex characters have layers: peel away another part of the onion or scoop away the next bit of parfait, and you discover another aspect of their personality.
This blog post, written for The Novel Factory, explore ways you can add that complexity to your characters.