create a stranger

A fellow writer asked for help creating characters “who don’t all feel the same”. Here’s what I suggested:

Personality is the sum total of... how someone is. How they behave, how others react to them. If your characters all feel too similar, I believe that would be because you aren't making an effort to craft differentiated strangers.

To unpack that statement a little bit, think about what you're making your characters do and say. It's really effortless to just... write down the first thing you think of. Boom, done. It feels easy, and so you assume it's genuine, because everyone says that characters will "speak" to you.

But the truth is, that easy, glib, always-the-same character you keep creating over and over again might just be... you.

Truly unique characters only start "speaking in their own voices" once you've gone to the trouble of crafting them. Once you've made them different from one another-- carefully, deliberately-- only then do they reach a certain critical mass of unique characteristics and come alive.

I often go back and tweak details such as having one character always use dashes— and another, always use ellipses... because that makes them look different on the page. I check and make sure that if one character habitually uses a certain expression, then no other character uses it. If I'm writing eye dialect (the sound of their speech, a la Mark Twain or James Herriot) then I am careful not to have two characters using the same accent in the same scene.

It's work to do all this, but work you have to put in if you want their personalities to be distinctive. Don't settle for the familiar. Create strangers who will become familiar to you.

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Rules for repetition

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Poiple panic