My 10 year old daughter met a tough challenge successfully yesterday and I told her she could choose a reward to celebrate.
She chose a Happy Meal from McDonalds. :) I got off very cheaply, and—since she’s the only member of our family who likes McDonalds —she got something she wanted, too (since who knows when she’ll get that fast food fix again?)
Her Happy Meal box was covered with gobs of marketing stuff, of course. The theme of this meal was a tie-in to a show that she watches on the Nickelodeon channel. One of the games on the box featured a list of sentences for children to connect to different characters on the show. Not catch-phrases, not quotations, but just likely things for the characters to have said.
I’m driving the car and she’s immediately assigning each character to a sentence. Right off the bat. Then she looked at the bottom of the box. “I got them all right!”
And I have to say I was very impressed…well, after wondering whether she was watching too much TV. :) The show has obviously done a bang-up job differentiating their characters.
Could I do the same thing for my own characters? It probably depends on the character. It would be easy for major or recurring characters. Secondary/supporting characters? I’d like to think so. But maybe it would take longer than the 10 seconds my daughter spent on her answers.
Apparently, on this show, one character is very vain, one has an overbearing mother, one has had a long-time crush on another character, etc. Not too far off from the kinds of things we’re doing with our books. We’re just doing our showing with words…we get a strong impression of a character who opens his car door and an avalanche of papers and food wrappers occurs, for instance.
We’re giving our characters personalities by showing how they interact with other characters (they’re supercilious, stubborn, cheerful, touchy) how they react to difficult situations (they get frustrated, they become leaders, they run off and hide), and—like the Happy Meal—showing character clues through dialogue (their choice of words, speech patterns, vocabulary, etc.).
How do you help readers differentiate between your characters?
This is such a great post! I’m not sure my characters would pass the quote test either! Maybe I should take dialogue from scenes and randomly mix them up, and make sure I can tell who said what… :)
Elizabeth – First, congratulations to your daughter on meeting her challenge. As to differentiating characters, that was something I faced in the novel I’ve just finished writing. Three of the main characters were male, of the same educational level, in the same profession and working together on a research project. So differentiating them was a challenge for me. I did it with little subtle touches. For instance, one’s a Phillies fan and in a few scenes he’s wearing his Phillies hat. Another is a music fan and has a radio show on the college radio station at the school where he works. Those little touches are really important if readers are to keep the story straight.
I’ve just spent the last hour trying to put a sentence to each of the characters in my WIP. The task proved more of a challenge than expected.
THANK YOU to this mom and her daughter for helping me discover another weakness in a story with great personal meaning.
Guidance is welcome, especially from rather perceptive young souls.
I started learning to write via fan fiction, and one early lesson was that people would say, “Duncan would NEVER say/do that.” Of course my immediate reply was, “Of course he would–just look at what I wrote. He said it!”
But I did learn to be careful about remaining true to the characters in everything they do or say.
Terry
Terry’s Place
Romance with a Twist–of Mystery
Great post! I always think there’s a lot writers can learn from children’s entertainment and this just goes to show it.
Have you ever read a book in which the character’s voices sound so similar that you can’t tell who is speaking? I have. It’s very off-putting. Yes, I realize that in the end, all our characters speak with our voice – but we’d better get to know them as individuals, allow them to express themselves as individuals, or we lose readers.
For me, it’s a matter of stepping outside of myself and into the head of each and every character, even if he or she is only a server in a restaurant with a single line.
Bethany Elizabeth–some of my very-minor characters are pretty interchangeable…I think I’ll have to fix that!
Margot–And those little touches are what makes it so realistic, too! We’re all giving these clues to what makes us tick…it’s just tapping into them.
Paul–I think so, too. Especially Spongebob, for some reason (and this Happy Meal *wasn’t* Spongebob, but there was a big lesson in it anyway!)
Susan–Good luck with your story! These characters always take some fiddling with, don’t they?
Terry–It’s funny how people can get such a strong sense of a character that they’d know what they’d think and say! Of course, that makes me tempted to tinker with the character and give them some sort of huge, life-changing event that alters them. :)
If the quiz was five or six characters long I’d be all right. Beyond that, I’m not sure.
Alex–It does make it tougher to have more, doesn’t it?
Julia–You’re absolutely right. If I can’t tell the characters apart as a *reader*, it’s confusing and frustrating. Better to make them all individuals if they have speaking parts.
I got better at this the more I wrote, although I think several characters in each book have very distinct voices. Or at least different enough personalities.
Diane–I think it’s definitely one of those things that gets easier as we go along.
Very interesting story about your daughter. I wish I can idenify that TV show though…
The “showing character clues through dialogue” part reminds me of a “character voice” article I did at the Superhero Nation blog. It’s all about vocab, force, quirks, situations, etc.
I’m not sure if I could! This is something I continue to work on! I don’t know know if my naive and innocent yet driven and curious main character could REALLY stand out against her manipulative cynical coworker (secondary) character roommate whose ambitions blur re lines of what is ethical and right. I hope they do. But I worry about stereotyping when wondering about that sharp contrast. Are we all so different?