Something I’ve been meditating on a lot as I work through some revisions is the mean girl. More broadly, the idea of the mean girl and what it means for a character to have dimension.

The mean girl is never just the mean girl. She’s acting a certain way because she wants something just as much as the protagonist does (and it’s very likely that the protag is getting in her way). The more you can narrow in on a) what she wants and b) why she wants it (as well as the other things in her life that she’s having to deal with) the more dimensions you have on your character.

Perhaps you’ve heard of people commenting that characters in your favorite book felt really three-dimensional, or maybe that characters in a different book really didn’t. What’s that mean from a writing standpoint? What’s the takeaway?

A great example of this is Valentina from Leigh Bardugo’s THE FAMILIAR. Is she mean? Yes! Is she directly opposed to our protagonist? Yes! Do we understand why she’s doing all the mean things she does? Absolutely.

I would casually define character dimensionality as how much the reader understands or gets to see who this person is outside of their leverage on the plot.

You may have experienced some heavily plot-driven stories where the characters don’t feel very fleshed out beyond their contributions to moving the plot forward. This man is the love interest (assassin). This girl is the princess (ice queen). They are going to be enemies-to-lovers but first they need to fake a marriage. Often, characters are little more than tropes in these scenarios.

This is the mean girl: her whole purpose in written life is to be a dick to the (usually female, usually lovable) protagonist.

Unfortunately, it makes the mean girl singularly uninteresting as a character if that’s all she is. The resolution to any conflict she’s a part of is either a) she needs to get over herself and her weird obsession with the protagonist’s behaviors or b) the protagonist has to “win” over her somehow, establishing the protagonist’s place on the mean girl’s pecking order. Especially if the protagonist is already involved in her own exciting conflicts, then the mean girl’s actions become just…annoying. An extra bother. She is a secondary character who contributes nothing to the reader’s enjoyment of the story more than inconvenience.

No one is cheering for the mean girl, and that is a huge problem.

Why? We’re supposed to hate the mean girl, right?

Sure, if all we know about her is that she’s the one who is going out of her way to be awful for no reason. That’s not just mean, that’s tedious. Some days I feel like all my writing advice can just be summed up as don’t be tedious. What does tedious mean here? Giving me a conflict I already know the ending to.

We all know how mean girl conflicts go. Mean girl is mean. Protagonist’s life worsens, usually unrelated. Protagonist does main plot arc, acquires thing mean girl wants or powers to save the world and also conveniently defeat mean girl. Mean girl leaves. Protagonist’s life improves.

If all your mean girl is is a lever to putting social pressure or expectation on the protagonist, then yes, she’s going to be boring. She only has one dimension and that dimension is mean girl.

How do we fix it? Give them more traits and more impact outside of just being mean.

Valentina is Luzia’s employer in THE FAMILIAR, but she’s also really good at embroidery and sewing. She loves fancy clothes, even if she doesn’t get the chance to wear many of them due to her noble but reduced circumstances. She’s bound by rules and social structures, but as much as she upholds them she hates some of them as well. She has a really interesting conflict of shaming other women for ignoring social mores while secretly wanting to do so herself.

Valentina’s inner turmoil with societal expectations isn’t anything related to the protagonist. It’s her own problem that informs her decisions, and it makes it much easier to empathize with her. She’s not just a mean girl, she’s someone in an unfulfilling marriage who’s grappling with life not turning out how she thought it would.

When we give a character more things to do that just fulfill a plot role (make protagonist’s life worse, communicate social status), that character feels more real. They gain dimension. Especially when we give them inner conflicts or traits that are oppose their actions (I want independence from expectations BUT if I can’t have that then I am going to reinforce them), they become a lot more interesting.

That said, this can also be a little counterintuitive. Isn’t a character supposed to act a certain way? Why are we giving them so many (sometimes contradictory!) traits? Isn’t this going to end up making character soup?

The trick to doing this is being intentional with your choices for conflict and then also asking a lot of “why” questions in character development. Continuing to use our example of the mean girl: why is she so obsessed with social status and expectations? Why is it so important to her? Is it the base of what makes her feel powerful? What does power look like to her, why does she need it? What worries her most about not having power– why is she so obsessed with keeping it?

When we start asking questions like that, we nail down what’s really important to our characters, much like you’ve no doubt done with your protagonist, love interest(s), antagonist, and other more major characters. The more characters (especially secondary ones) you can do this for, the more real these smaller characters are going to feel: they have interests and lives outside of what the reader sees. That’s the whole trick: you want to convince your reader that your characters’ lives go on when they’re not looking, like they’re just seeing little snippets of these interesting people’s emotions and lives whenever they read your stories.

We’ve covered what a three-dimensional character looks like and the importance of moving toward a more fleshed out character from an initial trope, but how do you do that? What’s the tool?

You can do a lot of things here. You can kind of ideate and woolgather and see what comes together– it’s always fun to invent backstories for people.

For me, I enjoy poking at specific strands and subverting reader expectation. It’s always surprising and delightful (and feels true to life) when I find something I never would have thought would be true about a character in a book that I’m reading. Gap moe is a concept from Japanese related to that– it’s basically something that so directly contrasts with a character’s type that it can’t help but be endearing. Like, “how can you possibly like/do that?” There’s a gap between expectation and reality, like the mean girl who volunteers at a horse rescue and helps with riding lessons.

You don’t expect her to be kind and patient, or love something messy and giant like a horse, but there she is. She gains dimension because she’s not doing what you may think she’d do. You’re exploring a contradiction– hard vs. soft– like the assassin who enjoys gardening (death vs. life). You can also go the reverse way (the cinnamon roll who is the bug-smasher in the relationship and has no fear no matter the size of the insect).

Humans are contradictory creatures. While we often act certain ways, the most interesting parts are, of course, the exceptions. In exploiting an exception, you give a character room to be much more than the reader was bargaining for, and that’s what’s going to keep us reading.

As usual, if you liked this and you’d like to support my habit of chatting about craft, you can buy me a coffee below. Or, if you’re looking for a freelance editor for you fiction needs, I also offer editing services over at Constellation Editorial.