In a new post, Mary Carroll Moore offers advice on making each of your story’s characters distinct. “Developed characters, fictional or real, should be individuals: distinct from others in the story,” Moore writes. “If they all blur together, it’s hard to make them come alive for the reader.”
In early drafts, writers focus on backstory and some external factors, like quirks or dress style. But too often, we lend our personal traits to our characters or give them qualities we wish we had, which is easy to repeat across characters or stories. So how do we keep our characters from becoming eerily similar?
One way is the tried and true questionnaire. Ask your characters how they dress, what music they love, their favorite foods. Imagine them in different settings and observe how they act. “Explore how different they can be from you, then how you can push them even further away from what you know and into who they are, uniquely as themselves,” Moore writes.
But then you still have to make sure your characters differ from each other. Moore suggests the following exercise:
- Choose a published book you love with at least three characters. Find an early scene in which at least two of them are present.
- Examine how the writer introduces them: what do they look like, how do they dress, walk, gesture? Which part of the description makes them stand out?
- Apply what you observed to your story. Compare your characters’ qualities and see how (and if!) they differ. Are they distinct enough or do they need more flavor?
