I'd venture to guess that you are caught in the worldbuilding trap. Worldbuilding is a perfectly fine hobby. You can make up characters and people and kingdoms and creatures. You can draw maps. You can imaging histories. This is all a perfectly fine way to keep yourself occupied on long rainy days. But it is not storytelling.

Storytelling is about putting a character to a test, forcing them to make some choice they don't want to make or to do some task they don't want to do (which is really the same thing). The character and the choice are made for each other. You need a choice that will be particularly painful for a character, and, equally, a character who will find a particular choice or task particularly painful.

The painful choice then gives you the shape of your story, as the character at first resists getting involved in the task that will lead them to the choice, then tries to get out of making the choice, and then is finally forced into making it, and then proves that they have (or have not) truly made it.

Every other event in the story is creating the conditions under which the main character will be forced to make that choice. Every other character in the story is there to play a part in creating those incidents. Everything bends toward that one climactic moment of choice and the denouement that proves the choice was made. (You can recast this in terms of task rather than choice if you wish. That image seems to be more palatable to some.)

It is really not about making your characters different, therefore. It is about making characters that fit the roles they need to play in building the arc of the story. If you work every character out in advance, there is a pretty good chance that they are not going to be the right characters to shape the story in the way it needs to go, and/or that you will simply have more than you need. But if each character plays a unique role in shaping the story towards its desired climax, chances are they will be different enough from each other to not cause concern.

In other words, design you characters for the job they have to do. If the characters fit their jobs, chances are you won't have a problem with duplication or sameness.

posted about 5 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

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You talk of your characters as one or two basic characteristics, and that's it. That's where your problem is. There is more to a person than a short tag. Think about your friends. Chances are, you can describe them all as "lawful good", or "friendly geek", or whatever kind of people you surround yourself with. But each is much more than one tag, right? Each has a whole set of character traits; each has their unique history, unique view on things, unique way of acting; each is a unique person.

As an example, here are some characters I used to play in an online text-based RPG (a MUD) many years back. All would be classified as lawful-good, but look at what made them different:

• Alpha was a young woman from an affluent family. She rebelled against her parents' expectations from a girl, and joined the army. Having grown up in a port city, she spoke like a sailor - using both naval metaphors and colourful language; a rebellious choice, since she certainly had the education to speak properly. Based on the same state of mind, she despised grandstanding and snobbishness. Underneath this façade, Alpha hid a bundle of insecurities about her parents maybe being right to some extent about some things, in particular about being able to find a husband while not being a "proper lady".
• Bravo was a minor nobleman, also a soldier. (See a commonality here? You might think they're the same person, only look how they aren't.) He didn't rebel against anything - he knew what his place in the world was, what his duty was, and he did just that. Consequently, his attitude was always calm and patient. Where Alpha was impulsive, Bravo thought things through. Where Alpha made a choice and ran with it, and then faced the consequences, Braco agonised over conflicting duties, turning them in his mind until he found the right path. He was also a family man, with a wife and kids, contributing to the whole "conflicting duties" thing.
• Charlie was a ranger rather than a soldier. While not too different in essence, his loyalty wasn't to "king and country" but to his comrades and company leader. He was also a dreamer, unlike the previous two characters: he wrote songs, and had "Plans" for the future. He wasn't actually very good at the whole "ranger" thing - he didn't lack courage or fighting skill, but when he needed to guard something, or scout, or perform some other task where the mind might wander, his mind did just that - he'd be thinking of his fiancée in great detail and rather forget everything else.

On the face of it they're all the same. When you delve a little deeper, they're not the same at all. They might all cite "protecting people" as their motivation for bearing arms, but in its details their motivation is different. In the same situation, they would take different actions. They would respond differently to the same stimuli. Some of their goals are the same, some are different. Coming from different backgrounds, they speak differently and see things differently. And so on.

Which is exactly where the answer lies: you need to give your characters more flesh, more development. Delve deeper into who each of them is. Each character is not a couple of tags - they are a person. Only once your characters are fleshed out enough, can they be different.

posted about 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Galastel‭

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Tone and intonation can matter a lot

Personality can set a tone for a character. A hero and an antihero might do the exact same things: they dress up as guards, infiltrate the Evil Overlord's base with their comedy-relief sidekick, square off against the Overlord, nearly die, discover the flaw in the Overlord's power source, dangle him off of a cliff, get persuaded to bring the Overlord back up off the precipice of death, get double-crossed but saved by an unexpected strength-of-will of said comedy-relief sidekick, kick the Overlord off the cliff for once and for all.

What made one the hero and the other the antihero is the tone that they brought to each of these. The antihero probably killed guards to infiltrate the base and stole their uniforms. She probably sneak-attacked the Evil Overlord and ran into his personal energy shield, foiling her. The flaw in his power source might have been a human being, a scientist who maintains the system, who she just straight-up murders to disable the power source. She was probably coaxed to save the Overlord by some promise of power or bringing some deceased loved one back, or something else essentially personal. And when she kicked him off the cliff he was begging for mercy.

Contrast with the hero. She probably got the guard uniforms by sneaking into a locker room. She probably infiltrated the keep via the loving kindness of some disaffected soldier who she befriended. She squared off one-on-one in the open with the Overlord and lost in a fair fight. The flaw in the power source was probably exploited by a simple act of industrial sabotage or pulling a cable or so. She probably saved him because he seemed to repent of his evil; she probably killed him because he had reconnected his power source and was about to Press The Button putting his final plan into immediate motion and There Was No Other Way.

Personality as a first approximation of tone

A weak resource to set tone, but still very good when you are starting out and have nowhere else to go, are the various personality systems that you can find online that give you a long description of the sort of Personality Archetype that someone has.

So: this “neutral good” person is ‘choleric’ and will argue for what she believes in; that “neutral good” person is ‘melancholic’ and he mostly broods and mopes about how things are not the way they should be. This ideologue is ‘intuitive introverted’ and she wants to just go her own way and trusts her hunches, one of which is her destructive ideology about How It Should Be; that ideologue is ‘sensing extraverted’ and he talks to everybody about his destructive ideology but only trusts what he can see, and this is based on extensive documented observation of What Works even though it flaunts how most people think it Should Be. Or he is a ‘classic Libra’, whereas she is ‘such a Taurus.’ Pick your favorite.

But that is small potatoes, a first approximation. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t have some Myers-Briggs axis where they say “all the quizzes say that I’m squarely 50/50 between Perceiving and Judging and I just don’t feel like either really applies to me.” Good for brainstorming, not great for fleshing out.

Journal, to create a much deeper appreciation

Your biggest resource for setting the tone of a character involves storytelling. We are each an amalgam of stories. You should consider writing those stories down first in a skeleton form of “things that happened to her” and then flesh those out.

Journaling from each of your characters’ perspectives, digging into their history and how those significant moments affected them, is only one approach. You can also write letters from those characters back to their younger selves about what they wish their younger selves knew. Or letters to each other: maybe what they would be saying if they could talk to each other during your plots, maybe what they have said in the past.

You want each character to have had pains and made choices and had successes and triumphs in their past. As those sorts of things come back into the story, you start to see your characters make rational decisions to seize the things they think they need or want. You also start to see them make irrational decisions because that is just “what she would do.” That is what this person would decide. Both change that tone and they change how that person intones what they do.

The logical risk of having more personality

At that point you are in a considerable deal of danger; every author is. An entropic force wants to make every story longer than it has to be. It is making this answer longer than it has to be. It wants to pull you towards digression and it wants your characters to choose to dither and draw out the book longer and longer. I like the example of Richard in Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule, he spends like half the plot of the book wasting time with the Mud People even though they cannot possibly get him where he is going. Your characters will decide to stay with the Mud People as long as possible, that is what is familiar and safe and “what they would do.”

So you need to have these strong ideas of who the characters are and then come at the problem backwards, “Sally is timid and unheroic and has safely escaped the Evil House at the cost of leaving Jake behind, but Jake hurt her and she hates him and she probably considers it Justice that he is stuck there. OK. But I have loved writing these scenes where they start to understand each other and he wins her heart and proposes to her twice and she says yes the second time. So what the heck do I need to engineer so that Sally has to go back to the House and face her demons so that she can rescue Jake from the unspeakable horrors inside?”

You need to know what Sally needs and wants and is irrationally afraid of, so that you can plausibly railroad her back to the plot when entropy wants to scatter her away. OK, so Sally doesn’t care about Jake. He is dead to her. But because of her childhood trauma that you have journaled, she only has this one locket with this one photo of her mother and it is Unspeakably Important to her. Maybe that’s the key: when they were still on good terms Jake was holding onto it and now Jake still has it. OK, now we’ve got legs, she still hates Jake but she needs to save him to get that locket back, I can rewrite a little of the earlier stuff to set this seed in place so that we can get Sally into Round Two, Fight with that Evil House.

posted about 5 years ago

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CR Drost‭

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