: Re: Making characters multidimensional and unique. What can I do? I'm writing a sci-fi/fantasy story and I have quite a number of characters that I want to deploy in the story. However, these characters

@Moriarity138

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Some of the other answers have done a great job at addressing the topic of good characters in general, so this focuses specifically on the dialogue:

In my opinion, great dialogue is all about subtext. When people talk to each other, what's going on in the words is rarely the whole conversation. Mood, hidden goals and desires, mutual history, personality, sexual tension, competition, aggression and so forth are all part of the subtext. Even a conversation about the weather can hold a wealth of information about the characters --are they real friends, fake friends, secret enemies, bored with each other, flirting?

A good exercise can be to write the subtext out explicitly and then write the dialogue second.

Example:

Subtext: I'm depressed ::Text: "So glad it's finally spring, I think
I would have killed myself if we had one more grey winter day."
Subtext: I need to make some smalltalk so I don't have to talk about anything real:: Text: "Hey, how about this sun, right?"
ST: I hate this guy:: T: "Hot enough for you? You must be burning up in that heavy suit."
ST: I wish I was somewhere else::T: "Sunny and sixty. But it looks like rain..."
ST: She's beautiful:: "Wow, it's really warm today. I bet the flowers will be blooming any minute now."

In the examples above, you might make very different choices to express the chosen subtext --that's not the point. The point is that you write the dialogue differently based on what the characters are thinking and feeling, even if the topic is the same.

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