A common culprit that keeps writers from making their work quality material is characters that sound exactly alike. Remember, each
character in your manuscript is a living, breathing, thinking person with
different wants, needs, and point of view from the others. A
good exercise to fleshing out characters is to figure out what each
character's super objective, figure out what a character truly wants in life (not
necessarily in the story). These are the big things, the ones in our
very core – to love, to be loved, to be powerful, to be respected, etc. Once
you figure that out, realize that this is JUST to determine their core
character – how they approach every situation and character they
encounter during the course of your story. It's the foundation, and
while it's certainly the most important layer, there are more layers:
the style, and the details.
A
character's style is not about their fashion, but about how, knowing
their core, they approach life and other people. Things like humor,
vanity, selfishness, selflessness, etc. You can think of a character's
style as a collection of their coping and defense mechanisms. How they
get by on their day to day life.
The
details are how, knowing their core and their style, what the little
actions are that they take frequently. For instance, if he drinks a lot,
or is always fixing his hair or keeps a pack of cigarettes rolled up in
his sleeve – even though he never actually smokes. Each person has
their own unique tics, between the character's roundabout way of parsing out
information, their distinct voices from each other (stemming from
different wants), and the dialogue feeding into the theme – each of
those individually are subtext, but the fact that all three are present
clues the reader in that the writer is a professional.
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