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Diversifying similar characters

Two characters in my current project are lifelong friends with similar tastes and interests. I've repeatedly gotten complaints that they're too hard to tell apart, but they play very different roles in the story, so I can't eliminate one. What techniques do you recommend to develop them in different directions?
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
They may have similar tastes and interest but they must have differences too. Find those differences and bring a few of them to the surface. Also if they're life long friends they will definitely have a long past full of disagreements.

For example. They both may love scifi but one may be a Star Wars fan while the other a Star Trek. Or if they both like Star Wars, maybe one takes the side that Han shot first and the other disagrees or prefers the prequels to the original series. They may both like comic books but maybe one loves Superman while the other Batman.

Also are their personalities exactly alike? Are they both introverts or are they both extroverts? Maybe one's an extrovert and one an introvert. Have you ever seen the TV show The Big Bang Theory? The main cast is full of geniuses and nerds with similar interests but each is unique in their pasts and who they are. Maybe check that out.
 

The Unseemly

Troubadour
This can be a tricky one to achieve. I can provide a few hints, however:

1. The way they speak. I haven't read your story(ies), so I don't know why people are saying their similar, but you could change the way they talk. Say, one of your characters had a difficult past, full of unpleasantness', however he/she has a certain grim wisdom about them from their past experiences. So they talk in an dark manner, and add this "acquired wisdom" of theirs.

The other character could be more light-hearted and have a more joking nature. He/she in his/her speech, makes full of odd comparisons, and can provide a bit of the so-called "comic-relief". Both characters can still have similar tastes and interests, however can have different backgrounds, proven by the way they speak.

2. The way they act. This can sort of add onto point number 1. Due to their backgrounds/specific events that happened in the story, both have a very different way of going about their business. One can be a cautious hunter, for example, the other a noble but careless fool.

3. What family they were born into. Usually, much of your early, family life is what shapes a lot of your character: who their parents were, if/by whom they were educated, and those background events, etc. all can help in how a character acts.

4. Also remember to show the character's bad sides as well as their good sides. This comes down to believability: nobody's perfect, all tastes and interests have their positives as well as their negatives, as do all people (or other races if you like).

Anyway, that's how I've found characters to work (on the most part), so hope this helps.

EDIT: Blast. Ninja'd. :/
 
How do they think? the way a character looks at thing's can help tell them apart. when they enter a room do they look up and down, or side to side? how do they look at the world? happy? grim? indifferent? these thing's would affect the thing's they say and the way they act. lastly do could you make them word thing's differently? one could have more country way of speaking, while the other speak's with more of a city man's voice. i'm sure there are lot's of thing's i missed, hope this help's!
 
What I had before I started this topic:

Both of them take after their mothers physically. Patty's mother was very short and somewhat scrawny by local standards, whereas Daisy's is the local blacksmith. Patty tends to literally look up at people, whereas Daisy is always aware she could beat them up if she wanted to.

Daisy is much more talkative and extroverted than Patty, and tends to act without planning. Patty is often dragged along in her wake.

Patty is very practical, and avoids any arguments that distract from her goals.

Patty is very inquisitive, and will attempt to understand the principles behind any new phenomenon she's presented with. Daisy is more likely to look at it in terms of how she can use it.

On the occasion Patty gets angry, she gets very, very loud, using a "large" voice to compensate for her unintimidating figure.

A few things I'm currently working on:

General affect. Daisy presents as somewhat "happy", but does that make Patty "sad", or just ambivalent? (Most likely the latter.)

How do their speech patterns differ? (Patty's a little more eloquent, but I think I'll keep them similar.)

How empathetic are they both? (Daisy's not very. Patty might be quite.)

How does Daisy behave when something scares her? (I'm still not sure.)

How do they differ in their relationship to their family? (Patty resents her father, but hasn't talked much about her mother. Daisy hasn't really mentioned either, but she has reason to worry about her mother, and I may be able to humanize her through that.)

P.S. Now that I think about it, the problem might actually be one of situation. For instance, I initially characterize Patty as the inquisitive one, but then I put them into a situation where both show interest in trying to find out what's going on.
 

Jess A

Archmage
Role-play or write short stories.

Put them into varying situations and use their context to see how they will react. How are their reactions different? What does this say about them?
 
A part of it might be the plot. You have a great list of differences between them, but playing those up isn't always easy-- often when characters aren't grossly different or simply on different sides, it may be safest to define the plot partly in terms of where the two disagree about what to do. Not that they have to turn against each other, but consider the elegance: if a character is an attitude and a plot is a way to define character, it seems like a waste to have more characters than the plot is ready to separate, just a little.

(Besides, if they're old friends, they're used to their talks rushing past all the things they agree on to hash out where they disagree, so they might spend a lot of time arguing over the few things they see differently about the problem. But that would be only when they're alone together or able to zero in on that unresolved question; otherwise it could be United Front.)

This might relate to how you say these two play different roles in the story. Maybe because you know there's a big change coming between their roles, you wait too long to play up the differences between them? This could end up with a sense that it's "different things happening to twins" that wouldn't be what you want.
 
I had the same problem with my MCs. They were too similar... they were the same. Yours seem very diversified in comparison to mine, even after I fixed mine. How about this.

Scrawl out a rough outline of their backstories. Place a minor incident in any one's backstory that does leave an imprint of some kind or the other in that one's mind. Keep these backstories near you. Keep writing. Is there a slight change in the personality of the owner of the revised backstory? Take note of it. Keep writing. Familiarise yourself with this change. Keep writing.

Oh dear, I'm rambling. Anyway, to me, yours seem sufficiently diversified.

General Effect: Daisy may seem more jolly, but that doesn't make Patty sad. I'm an introvert, but I'm a very happy person and I depict that image (or so I think...). It just makes her more restrained and shy, but not sad. Patty depicts a more responsible image.

Speech Patterns: I don't know, perhaps Patty should be a little more eloquent.

Empathy: Patty would seem more empathetic, but less likely do anything about it than Daisy, in my opinion.

Fear: This is traditionally influenced by childhood lessons and incidents, and general character. Daisy, from what you said so far, I feel, would not shy away that fast.

And that PS... Damn. Well, you never know, a situation like this might arise again. Plus, I don't think it's weird that both of them would be trying to find out what's going on... but I don't know the context, so I won't make such an assumption.

Well, anyway, I hope what I said helped, and if it didn't, I'm over there on the bottom right of the screen with my sledgehammer trying to excavate that damned chat box.
 

Nihal

Vala
My advice is to take a good, long look at yourself and your friends, preferentially those from childhood or teenage years. I have many points in common with my friends, but we're utterly and completely different from each other.

I have rude friends who loves to troll people and fight, I have gentle friends who go out of their way to help people–and often get screwed by this–, I have friends with no sense at all and friends who are too emotional at inconvenient times. Most of them are males, while I'm a female, but some of these are female too. I shore more than one interest in common with them, they're my closest friends, yet it doesn't make us copies of each other, we have many different traits which go deeper from the typical introvert vs extrovert, and we still have different tastes.

I lost contact with the most of my childhood friends, but it doesn't keep me from analyzing how was our friendship too, the differences and similarities.
 

Devora

Sage
The best example i can give is the Play/Movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which is based around the two "one scene wonders" from Hamlet during that play's events.

These are two very similar characters that have the same expectations in life, but they have their quirks that differentiate each other.

I recommend the Movie (i saw it on netflix), Starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the Titular characters. It's also written & directed by Tom Stoppard, the man wrote the original play. (read the play too, though.)

You could also read Waiting on Godot (A similar play which inspired Stoppard's), but I can't recommend it on the fact that I haven't read it yet.
 

SeverinR

Vala
Role-play or write short stories.

Put them into varying situations and use their context to see how they will react. How are their reactions different? What does this say about them?

This helped me with a character, it was a writing challenge that I really liked to do. Not sure I could do it for all the characters though.
 
I've been looking through what I've written, and I think the problem is probably more with Patty than Daisy. Because she's "the quiet one", I didn't give her a lot of lines unless something got her mad. Thus, the times she made an impression were the times she was acting more like Daisy. I think I need to find more ways to have her still be active in the scene even when she doesn't say much. (Maybe she tries to "Um" and "Er" and keeps getting talked over.)
 

A. E. Lowan

Forum Mom
Leadership
I've been looking through what I've written, and I think the problem is probably more with Patty than Daisy. Because she's "the quiet one", I didn't give her a lot of lines unless something got her mad. Thus, the times she made an impression were the times she was acting more like Daisy. I think I need to find more ways to have her still be active in the scene even when she doesn't say much. (Maybe she tries to "Um" and "Er" and keeps getting talked over.)

That is actually a very good way to differentiate Patty from Daisy. Maybe she has a tendency to be a bit of a doormat... until she's not. Maybe have Daisy be the worst one about running over her, or even tend to finish Patty's sentences or repeat more loudly what Patty had just said in her soft voice like it is her idea. Daisy is, of course, not doing this to be mean. As the more aggressive of the two friends, she's just used to doing all the talking, plus when you've been close friends with someone for so long, you tend to "share the brain," as it were. This would definitely showcase the differences in their personalities, and give Patty more action - she wants to be more interactive, but she has to get steamed up enough to override Daisy to make it happen.
 
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