: Re: Do my characters need to have different mannerisms in order to be perceived as different? My editor returned to me with her initial critique of my novel, saying some characters were too similar,

@Kimberly114

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Showing personality instead of saying personality can be great when done well. I agree with Cloudchaser's answer of getting another opinion.

I'd also recommend going back through and reading it yourself. Maybe not the whole thing, but focusing on just on those two characters and look to see if you can notice differences and similarities between the two of them. Try and figure out where they overlap and where they are different. Then differentiate between the two and make those personalities pieces more defined.

What you're trying to avoid by highlighting those differences is confusing your reader on who is the character in your scene. It should be natural for them to pick up on who it is, even if it isn't ever expressly stated. They can have a lot of the same motivations, but two people go about things differently, so two people who have the same flaws are going to be different, same with likes and dislikes.

For example:

Jane looked at the frozen yogurt in the window and at her reflection. It looked so tasty but she knew she shouldn't spend any more money on frozen yogurt this week. That didn't matter, it had been a bad day, she was going to get some.

John knew that the frozen yogurt shop was on the other side of the street. There was a specific reason that he was on the opposite side of the street. If he walked in front of the shop on a bad day, he knew he would go in and get some frozen yogurt.

This is a really small example, but we have two characters who have a weakness/like of frozen yogurt. The way I was trying to write it, not sure if it fully came across in the quick example, is that with John you can build on avoiding an issue or self-discipline that make him unique from Jane who might be more apt to give into temptation. The frozen yogurt piece, temptation by it and love of it, is the same, but you can create two different experiences with it that make the characters separate. Then you expound upon those differences in other scenes.

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