Characters with Distinct Personalities

[Christopher Michael]

This is what I've always thought -- that reinforcing character traits can be done in revision. But won't that make you run into problems? For instance, if I can use Fifth's example with the man kicking the dog, #1's personality directly affects what she does.

So let's say that the man kicking the dog is the villain. If only #1 sees this happen, she'll go after the guy and confront him, which could lead to him being revealed as the villain or whatever. But if only #2 sees this happen, she won't do anything, and the confrontation won't have happened. This can change a large part of your story.

You're not wrong. However, this is not a minor characteristic of a character, but an intergral part of how they interact with the scene. Whether they come across "flat" has nothing to do with this. How your character reacts to something like this is something that should always be at the front of your mind while writing.

 

[skip.knox]

I don't like personality charts and such because they lack contradiction. I don't see a character as a type; I see a character behaving. Sometimes the character is brave, sometimes cowardly. And so on. I don't like left-brain/right-brain or any of that nonsense. I want real characters who are messy and inconsistent and often don't know their own minds.

La Volpe asked me what I mean about bored with a character. Yes, that's exactly it. If I feel like there's nowhere to go with a character, if they are like a dull, backwater town barely worth a stop for gas, then one of two things: I either need to lose the character, or I need to re-engineer the character from the ground up.