Avoiding Accidental flanderization

I'm writing a novel-length fanfic just for myself fun, and I have a question: How do I make sure my round characters, especially the protagonists, don't devolve into one-note beings?

Is their reaction to everything always the same? can you describe them with one word? the angry guy, the sweet girl etc?

If yes then you have a one dimentional character.

Keep an eye on how they're presented to the audience, and when you have the need to or the opportunity for it, introduce a bit of unexpected depth; instead of playing to expectations, play against them.

This works very well for secondary or tertiary characters as well.

Also, if there's anything that causes the characters to change but is not shown to the readers (in other words, "off-screen stuff"), write the relevant scenes anyway. That way any character development is more likely to be closer to what it would have really been had the characters been real people, rather than being a blind man's guess that might or might not be accurate.

It might feel like a little thing, but if you start cutting corners because the results of character development are "approximated" and just a bit off, at some point you will end up with something that doesn't resemble the original figure and is bland and tasteless because too much stuff will have fallen off from it.

I fully agree with that. I quite often write behind the scenes stuff - or just write stuff then take it out later as it's bogging down the story - that is going to affect later outcomes.

Same principle as I mentioned in the recent Teenagers Having Sex thread - don't try to guess what they'd be like after the events that aren't shown to the audience, write them out, see how the characters develop, then write with those developed characters in mind.

edited 3rd May '15 7:43:55 PM by Wolf1066

It also helps to keep notes of things your character has always done. If in bullet form, the reactions all seem the same, try to dig into a new angle for it. Failing that, changing the motivation (either by making it deeper or by pulling in new information), you can keep the same action but add a fresh take on it.

When you let us see the character grow in some way, it stops being a cut-and-paste, one note response.