Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

60%
+1 −0
Q&A Do my characters need to have different mannerisms in order to be perceived as different?

Showing personality instead of saying personality can be great when done well. I agree with Cloudchaser's answer of getting another opinion. I'd also recommend going back through and reading it yo...

posted 6y ago by The Scando‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T08:46:47Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36006
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar The Scando‭ · 2019-12-08T08:46:47Z (about 5 years ago)
Showing personality instead of saying personality can be great when done well. I agree with Cloudchaser's answer of getting another opinion.

I'd also recommend going back through and reading it yourself. Maybe not the whole thing, but focusing on just on those two characters and look to see if you can notice differences and similarities between the two of them. Try and figure out where they overlap and where they are different. Then differentiate between the two and make those personalities pieces more defined.

What you're trying to avoid by highlighting those differences is confusing your reader on who is the character in your scene. It should be natural for them to pick up on who it is, even if it isn't ever expressly stated. They can have a lot of the same motivations, but two people go about things differently, so two people who have the same flaws are going to be different, same with likes and dislikes.

For example:

Jane looked at the frozen yogurt in the window and at her reflection. It looked so tasty but she knew she shouldn't spend any more money on frozen yogurt this week. That didn't matter, it had been a bad day, she was going to get some.

John knew that the frozen yogurt shop was on the other side of the street. There was a specific reason that he was on the opposite side of the street. If he walked in front of the shop on a bad day, he knew he would go in and get some frozen yogurt.

This is a really small example, but we have two characters who have a weakness/like of frozen yogurt. The way I was trying to write it, not sure if it fully came across in the quick example, is that with John you can build on avoiding an issue or self-discipline that make him unique from Jane who might be more apt to give into temptation. The frozen yogurt piece, temptation by it and love of it, is the same, but you can create two different experiences with it that make the characters separate. Then you expound upon those differences in other scenes.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2018-05-08T14:27:43Z (over 6 years ago)
Original score: 3