Static character: definition, examples and why writers use them

A static character is a character who stays essentially the same from the beginning of a story to the end. Their personality, beliefs and values don't change in any lasting way, even when their circumstances do. Sherlock Holmes is the standard example: across four novels and 56 short stories he takes on new cases and new enemies and never becomes a different man. The opposite is a dynamic character, who goes through a real inner change.

Static is a description, not a criticism, and it's about change, not depth: a static character can be as complex as anyone in the book. Most of the people in a typical novel are static, and some of the best are: the loyal friend, the unrepentant villain, the bore who is as tiresome in the last chapter as in the first. Below are twelve examples from classic fiction, one of them a borderline case, with what each does for its story and how to write your own.

What makes a character static

Compare the character in their first scene with the character in their last. Four things count: personality, beliefs, values and how they see themselves. If none of those has shifted for good, the character is static, however much has happened to them. Three kinds of change don't count:

• A change of fortune. In Charles Perrault's “Cinderella” (1697), the heroine goes from the hearth to the palace and ends as kind as she began: she gives her stepsisters rooms in the palace and marries them to two lords of the court. Her life changes completely. She doesn't.
• New information. Solving the murder teaches a detective a fact, not a new self.
• A feeling that passes. Remorse or tenderness that lasts a scene and leaves no mark on later choices is a mood.

Static, dynamic, flat and round

Two pairs of terms get mixed up here. Static and dynamic describe change. Flat and round describe complexity: E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927) defines a flat character as “constructed round a single idea or quality” and a round one as “capable of surprising in a convincing way.” The pairs are independent, so a static character can be either.

Static character examples

Static protagonists

Barrie announces his static hero in the first sentence. In the last chapter Wendy is grown, with a daughter of her own, and Peter flies back “exactly the same as ever,” still with all his first teeth. He has forgotten Captain Hook and Tinker Bell. The change in the book belongs to Wendy, and its sadness comes from the gap between the one who grows and the one who can't.

Sherlock Holmes shows why series characters are usually static. Arthur Conan Doyle killed him at the Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem” (1893) and brought him back in “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903), and readers got the same man. Pollyanna, in Eleanor H. Porter's 1913 novel, is static in another way: she already believes what the story is about, and her “glad game” changes the town instead. Writers call this a flat arc, and the character arc guide shows how one works.

Static characters who measure the hero's change

Pip changes three times: a blacksmith's boy ashamed of his coarse hands, a London gentleman ashamed of Joe, and finally a man ashamed of having been ashamed. Joe doesn't change, which is what makes Pip's changes visible.

Steady doesn't mean unresponsive, though. Compare two of Joe's decisions. In Chapter 18, when Jaggers offers him money for releasing Pip from his apprenticeship, Joe turns it down and can't finish the sentence: “if you think as Money can make compensation to me for the loss of the little child—what come to the forge—” In Chapter 57, with Pip ill and arrested for debt, Joe nurses him, pays the debt himself and goes home before Pip can thank him. Refusing money and paying it look like opposite acts. Both come from one value: what is between Joe and Pip is not a money matter. The circumstances have moved and the principle hasn't. A static foil works like a ruler laid beside a dynamic hero.

Static by choice

Some of the richest static characters are offered a real chance to change and turn it down. The refusal can tell the reader as much as a conversion would.

Lydia has run off with Wickham after Elizabeth warned him not to let her go to Brighton, and he sees his share of the blame. He also predicts that the feeling won't last, and nine chapters later he is reading Elizabeth a letter from Mr. Collins for the fun of it. Austen gives him a dynamic character's self-knowledge and lets him decline to act on it.

For one chapter the captain softens. He speaks of the young wife he “widowed” by marrying her, asks Starbuck to “let me look into a human eye,” and Starbuck begs him to turn for home. Then Ahab looks away, and the next chapter begins the chase. The novel's last quiet scene is built around the one change Ahab won't make.

Miss Havisham is the borderline case. Jilted on her wedding day, she keeps her watch and clock stopped at twenty minutes to nine and still wears the wedding dress years later. Then, in Chapter 49, she cries to Pip, “What have I done! What have I done!” A change that late still makes a character dynamic, but it lands only because the reader has watched her hold still for so long.

Static villains and obstacles

Othello changes from a confident general to a jealous murderer to a man who sees what he has done. Iago doesn't move: hidden in the first scene, silent in the last. A villain who never repents keeps the pressure on the hero steady (see how to write a villain).

Lady Catherine de Bourgh is static in a way the plot can use. She drives to Longbourn to forbid Elizabeth to marry Darcy: “Miss Bennet, you ought to know that I am not to be trifled with.” Elizabeth won't promise, and Lady Catherine, being exactly herself, reports the refusal to her nephew. That report is what tells Darcy he can ask again: “It taught me to hope.”

Comic static characters

Mrs. Bennet spends the novel complaining of her nerves. In the last chapter, with three daughters married, Austen reports that she “still was occasionally nervous and invariably silly.” Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth, puts her refusal down to “the usual practice of elegant females” and is engaged to her friend Charlotte Lucas within days. Neither learns anything, and that is the joke.

What static characters are for

How to write a static character

1. Name what stays fixed

   Write it as one sentence the character would agree with: “Family comes before rank” for Joe, “Nothing is worth getting upset about” for Mr. Bennet. Every scene they appear in will test it. The character traits list can help you find the exact word.

2. Show it in a choice early

   The first time the character matters, have them act on the belief instead of stating it.

3. Raise the price each time

   Holding firm when it costs nothing proves nothing. Make them pay more for the same principle as the story goes on.

4. Vary the situation, keep the response

   Consistency isn't repetition. New kinds of trouble show new sides of the same person, the way each case shows another side of Holmes.

5. Offer one chance to change

   Give them a moment where change is possible, as Austen does for Mr. Bennet and Melville for Ahab, and let them refuse it.

6. Let someone else move

   Make sure the story changes around the fixed character: a protagonist who learns from them, a town that gives in, a rival who breaks.

Hal says the same four words in both scenes. What has changed is the price: in Chapter 2 his rule costs a junior reporter a night's sleep, in Chapter 31 his job. The novel's change belongs to Priya, who learns from him.

Common mistakes with static characters

• Static by neglect. A minor character who only reacts, fixed on nothing, isn't static so much as empty. The supporting characters guide covers how to keep a cast from turning into props.
• Drift. Over a long draft, a static character softens because the writer got fond of them. Readers notice when the stern aunt turns charming in Chapter 20 for no reason. Write each static character's fixed sentence in a cast list, one line each, as in the first step above. If it needs a paragraph, the character isn't fixed yet.
• A static lead in a static world. If the protagonist doesn't change, someone or something else must.
• A last-chapter conversion. If a static character is going to change at the end, give the reader one earlier crack to remember, or the turn looks like the author's convenience.

For the main static characters, the character profile template has room for the fixed sentence and the scenes that test it. Once a draft exists, attach your cast list in a chat with the Strokes Assistant and ask it to find the scenes where a character acts out of line with their sentence. Some departures will be deliberate, like Miss Havisham's in Chapter 49.