"A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat"
About this Quote
Stout is taking a swing at the kind of “clever” writing that shows its seams. “Thought-out” sounds like craft, discipline, professionalism - all the virtues workshops prize. He flips it into an indictment: a character engineered to prove a point, deliver a theme, or hit plot beats isn’t alive, just assembled. “Contrived” is the tell. It’s not anti-intellect; it’s anti-calculation that mistakes architecture for pulse.
The jab lands because it borrows the oldest critical shorthand - round versus flat - then reassigns the blame. Flatness isn’t a failure of imagination so much as a symptom of authorial overcontrol. A “thought-out” character is one the writer can fully account for, which is exactly the problem: real people exceed their dossiers. “Born” doesn’t mean mystical inspiration so much as the moment a figure begins to surprise its maker, behaving with internal contradiction instead of narrative obedience.
Context matters. Stout wrote popular, tightly plotted detective fiction, a genre that practically begs for functional characters: suspects, motives, alibis. His best work (Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin) endures because the leads aren’t just mechanisms for solving puzzles; they have habits, hungers, rhythms. Stout is warning fellow professionals that readers can feel the difference between a character built to serve the story and a character whose inner life generates story.
The subtext is a quiet dare: let your people ruin your outline a little. If everything fits too neatly, you haven’t written a person - you’ve written a solution.
The jab lands because it borrows the oldest critical shorthand - round versus flat - then reassigns the blame. Flatness isn’t a failure of imagination so much as a symptom of authorial overcontrol. A “thought-out” character is one the writer can fully account for, which is exactly the problem: real people exceed their dossiers. “Born” doesn’t mean mystical inspiration so much as the moment a figure begins to surprise its maker, behaving with internal contradiction instead of narrative obedience.
Context matters. Stout wrote popular, tightly plotted detective fiction, a genre that practically begs for functional characters: suspects, motives, alibis. His best work (Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin) endures because the leads aren’t just mechanisms for solving puzzles; they have habits, hungers, rhythms. Stout is warning fellow professionals that readers can feel the difference between a character built to serve the story and a character whose inner life generates story.
The subtext is a quiet dare: let your people ruin your outline a little. If everything fits too neatly, you haven’t written a person - you’ve written a solution.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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