how to create distinct characters
Reader Zach emailed with a question about how to create distinct personas for characters in a novel.
I think the key to creating distinct characters lies in three parts – perceptions, actions, and speech patterns.
By perceptions, I mean that different characters will notice different things in a situation. There is an old joke says that the first thing a woman notices about a man is the quality of his shoes, but there is a grain of truth to the joke that a writer can use – different characters will notice different things about a situation.
For example, if I looked at a cow, I would see “a cow”.
But one of my relatives was a farm inspector, and if he looked at the cow, he would see its age, its general health, whether it was a Jersey or a Holstein or whatever, and a dozen other details I didn’t know even existed. In the same vein, if he looked at the computer I’m using to write this, he would probably think of it as this annoying necessary evil that had intruded its way into his life over the last fifteen years. When I look at this computer, I see an Asus Transformer T300L tablet with Windows 10, a Core i3 processor, and a 64 gigabyte solid-state hard drive – a dozen different details that my relative would have no idea existed.
Already, you can see that my relative and I were very different people (or distinct characters) based upon our perceptions.
Second, characters act differently. This seems obvious, but one of the best ways to create distinct characters is to think of how a character would react in a stressful or an unusual situation. Like, say a police officer walks up to your character and starts asking him pointed questions about his activities. How does the character react? Does he panic? Make a joke? Threaten to call his lawyer? Cooperate calmly? Run for it? Flirt with the officer? Complain about the loud teenagers across the street? Assume it’s a scam and ask to see the officer’s badge? How a character responds to a stressful situation is a great way of making them a distinct character.
Third, characters talk differently. This is a tricky one to do right, because sometimes it is painful to read a writer’s attempt to render a strong regional or national accent. (An excellent example of this problem is HP Lovecraft’s story THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE, where his attempts to produce the heavily-accented dialogue of a rural New England farmer are just bad.)
That said, it’s a good idea to vary speech patterns. A college professor will talk differently than a car salesman. A teenage girl might talk in one unending run-on sentence, or in sullen one-word answers. Sherlock Holmes said he could determine a man’s trade by the shape of his hands, but it’s also sometimes possible to determine a man’s occupation by how he talks. Having all your characters talk in the same voice and the same speech pattern makes it harder to tell them apart.
So I think those are the three parts of creating a distinct character – perceptions, actions, and speech patterns.
-JM