You have too many characters

As soon as your characters begin to resemble each other, you have more characters than you are able to deal with.

It might be a problem of having more characters than the story needs. Then you'll need to evaluate what roles you need and how many characters you need to fulfill them. Often one character can fulfill several roles. So maybe the two characters need to be merged, or one of them merged with another character.

This often happens when aspiring writers have a simple straightforward storyline that calls for a single protagonist and maybe one companion, but want to use a group of adventurers like in the Lord of the Rings. They have the grumpy dwarf, the wise elf, the honorable human, the mysterious thief, and so on – but what are they all gonna do? What do they say when they sit around the fire? How are their relationships playing out? If the story doesn't need them all, they will soon begin to resemble each other, because they are all just aspects of the single protagonist that the story really needs.

So if you are working on a team based story, I very much suspect that you have come up with as many characters as the team needs to write together, but haven't yet come up with a story that actually needs all these characters. What you have is like an online computer game that offers a hundred different characters for the players to choose from, but they all have the same goal and the same quest to go on, and the same tasks to fulfill.

What you may have done is decide on the number of characters based on the number of writers in your team and the writing process that you have agreed on, instead of developing in a story first approach and deducing the number and personalities of your characters from your story.

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

System‭

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The Quick Route to Distinction

The Fatal Flaw

This is some part of the personality/self that is out of control of the main character, or at least if it's going to be fixed it's going to take an entire book and whether they succeed may determine whether the characters succeed.

Greed, Perfectionism, Lust, Dumb, Glutony, Naive, Sloth, ... continuous list of faults which could weaken a character.

Each character should have their own and should be tied into their story, why they are the way they are, and why they don't quite fit with others. What's more, when the fatal flaw get's activated it takes character off of whatever track they were supposed to be following.

Each flaw will inform different behavior, different avoidances, different types of failure and at times different responses to innate situations.

The Handicap

This is a thing that is not "part" of the character, but which the character believes about themselves or about the world that prevents them from doing things. A respect for life, might lead to pacifistic attitudes that make being a part of war particularly hard. Whereas, a refusal to tolerate mistakes in others because you believe you must demand perfection of those around you will likely not win you too many friends, and it's a personal belief.

These are the types of things that make minor character arcs. They are your bread and butter. But, they aren't the things that people remember in ten years after reading your book.

The Quirk

If you're really struggling then you give each character a quirk. This can be something silly that just really stands out; or it could be a distinct behavior they constantly do. Maybe they exclaim a certain way; maybe they are always steeling things in whatever room they are in; maybe they always poke a bear; Maybe they believe something rediculous; maybe they are always sarcastic; maybe there's a token they always hold and think about...

A quirk is a habit, device, or behavior that's always around when that character is around.

Goals

Each character likely wants something different. Now that you know what they aren't. And you've got something ancillary that makes your characters distinctive and memorable, you need to make sure they are motivated to do different things. With their flaws, handicaps and quirks they're going to value different things. And so, when they see a problem they are going to tackle it in different ways, believe different things. Or, if they work well together they'll know which way they need to go (but also who they need to steer in the right direction).

Examples

Go read The Reckoners by Brandon Sanderson if you want to see this strongly in action. It's a team based story, and without ruining anything here are a few quirks, handicaps, flaws, goal:

• A character who can't use metaphor correctly, but constantly wants to.
• A character who say's he's Scottish, has a story about how those ancestors invented every little thing, but likely doesn't actually know anything about that background.
• A character that emphasizes hip/young/popular teen
• A character that used to be a mortician, constantly makes jokes about death
• A french candadian (quirk enough?) who believes the bad guys will be good guys some day
• A character who believes they will betray everyone and is afraid of themselves (more handicap/flaw)
• A character who is lazy and rolls over for others to avoid confrontation
• A character who is caring for a woman he loved who is now in a coma, and can't leave his location, can't be discovered.

Know Your Boundaries, Get Variation

Give your characters enough unique personality qualities and they can't help but take different positions on issues. They won't seem like the same people at all. The more individual they are, the more distinct they appear.

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Kirk‭

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There are whole books on characterization; it is difficult to treat in a few hundred words.

What makes characters stand out from each other is what makes the people around you unique; their attitudes, skills, upbringing and background (life up to when we meet them), morals, to some extent their education/training, how emotional they are, how fearful they are, what they fear or will go out of their way to avoid, what they love or will go out of their way to engage.

Attitudes can relate to how much they respect law and order, constituted authority, do they respect the rabble or only the well-educated, or vice versa? How do they feel about racial issues? What are their sexual standards? For example, female spies often engage in sex acts with targets to gain information; and become what the target wants in order to get close to them. Her attitudes toward who she is willing to get naked with and what she is willing to do for them have to be pretty unconstrained, even more so than a common prostitute. (Because the prostitute can find another John, the spy must seduce a specific person.)

Think about each character's background, it is a product of their personality, and it should all be consistent with what they have become when we meet them. If I have a hacker, I have somebody that has spent countless hours alone, every day growing up, fiddling with code and computers and teaching themselves to hack. That requires a certain personality, a willingness to put aside friends and socializing to GAIN those hours alone. Also a disregard for privacy and the law. What entertains them? Solving puzzles and finding weaknesses, victory over another mind.

If I have a warrior, I have somebody that has spent countless hours training with weapons, fighting without weapons. They have become accustomed to being hurt, bruised, perhaps even broken, they can endure pain and keep on fighting, they have panic and fear trained out of them. That takes a resolute personality.

What are they good at? Why, and how did they get that way, what aspects of their personality lets them endure the 10,000 hours of practice it takes to become an expert at it?

What are they bad at? Why? People bad at something have given up on getting good at it. So what in their personality prevents them from succeeding at this? Is it a lack of intelligence or understanding? Is it a fear of physical pain? Is it a fear of emotional pain, rejection or ridicule or embarrassment? Impatience? These traits will pervade the rest of their lives and relationships, too.

You make your characters distinct by making them distinct people. Even if they play stereotypical roles (the fighter, the hacker) you don't have to give them a stereotypical background. For example, your hacker might be quite expert with a handgun, not because she grew up with them or loved shooting -- She did neither -- but because in college after a walking-home-at-night fear, she was certain somebody was definitely following her. Perhaps she is a little paranoid, too. She made a conscious decision to arm and protect herself, and treated shooting like a puzzle to solve, and by dint of intelligence she became an expert at it. And she is a solitary person, alone most of the time, and her gun comforts her and allays her fears. There is a reason our hacker is a good shot and has a handgun in her purse, and another under her mattress, and one in her car, and one in the kitchen drawer. And why none of them will fire without her palm print on the handle, because she is a hacker.

Like this example I just made up; avoid the easy, empty motivations. She doesn't love guns because her daddy raised her that way; that's an empty excuse. So is "She just loves X." Or "I am just that way." Those are easy ways out for you, the author, not explaining what should be explained. Look for something deeper, and harder for you to invent. Too many characterizations on paper fall flat because they are incoherent, and they are incoherent because there is no good back story for them.

If she is suspicious of strangers, why? Invent a concrete reason, an event, or something that happened to her mother or friend. Have a reason ready, she was conned out of $5000 by believing a stranger. That may turn into half a line of explanation, but it's there. If another character asks "What's wrong with you?" in regard to her distrust, she can tell them, "I have experience, I've been conned and robbed and I don't make the same mistake twice." This little micro-conflict between two characters doesn't have to go anywhere or become a feud; but it adds momentary tension and helps build two characters: They are obviously distinct if their core beliefs produce a disagreement. And that is what you want.

Every little brick you struggle to invent in this story goes into a wall of creativity. That is much of the secret of a good book; condensation: that you labor for six months or a year, to make something somebody can read at a page a minute, and find in that minute a few hours worth of your creativity.

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Amadeus‭

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