We humans are by our nature complex, rarely easy to grasp (much less comprehend), and liable to surprise at any given moment. That singular human complexity is an important quality to pass onto your protagonist-characters, especially if we’re going to be following said characters for a good while.
Complex characters are often easier to describe by what they are not: they are not formulaic, they are not stereotypical, they are not monotonously predictable. They have depths and idiosyncrasies and are dynamic.
E.M. Forster is useful here. He famously divides fictional characters into two types: flat characters and round characters1. Flat characters are often comprised of a single caricaturizing trait that renders them “memorable, predictable” and usually unchanging. Flat characters “never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere — little luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.”
What Forster makes clear is that there’s nothing wrong with flat characters; most of our narratives require “flat people as well as round, and the outcome of their collisions parallels life more accurately." Which is to say The Lord of the Rings needs Frodo Baggins as much as it needs Barliman Butterbur.
Round characters on the other hand give “readers a slightly new pleasure each time they come into the story, as opposed to the merely repetitive-pleasure result of a flat character…The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round.” The round character “has the incalculability of life about it — life within the pages of a book.”
And finally: “It is only round people who are fit to perform tragically for any length of time and can move us to any feelings (except humor and appropriateness).”
Surprise, incalculability, development (aka change) — not bad DNA for complexity.
Complexity, naturally, is subjective and story-dependent. The complexity needed for Sethe’s character in Beloved is not the same complexity needed for Reacher’s character in Lee Child’s series. And yet Reacher’s complexity – a protagonist who shuns the domestic to the point that he shapes his entire life around its avoidance – while also serving domesticity’s order with all his being – is what makes him a character capable of sustaining a series.
One reliable engine for complexity is, of course, contradiction. Humans are contradiction engines; we are the Borg of contradictions – everything we touch, everything we create, is rife with contradictions. Reacher’s whole domesticity bag is an example of a generative contradiction, because that’s what we want for our characters – not contradictions for contradictions sake but contradictions that produce the twin coils of surprise and human recognition from our readers, and which help to move the story along.
But the technique I’ve always used to add complexity to all my protagonist characters is one that I believe all writers could benefit from, which is to give your characters a