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Topic : Re: I'm looking for advice on character development I'm currently working on a team based story with a lot of characters and am looking for ways to really make their personalities stand out from - selfpublishingguru.com

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As others have said, you could stand to narrow the question down. That being said, if it's a team-based story, you can easily use their role as a starting point for how to give them distinct characterisation.

For example, I have a team involving a female swordmaster (at a time where this is unusual), a formerly homeless master archer, and a scholar/spymaster with a traumatic past. There are others in the team, but for illustrating the example for the question, this will do.

Firstly, the swordmaster; she's unusual for the time, and obviously had to struggle against society's pressures the entire time she worked for her role as swordmaster. The fact she achieved it means that:

She's a hard worker
She believes in her way over anything else and is willing to stick with it
She understands swordplay at far more than just an instinctive level
She's likely very detached from her feminine side

Hence, when characterising her, I made her, in essence, a female-to-male transman in a setting where unfortunately gender reassignment is just not a thing. So this explains her attitude; she doesn't care what people say, to her, she's a man no matter what, and she's getting a career related to that.

She's also a good teacher, because her hard work against the odds, the necessity of her breaking down every technique, means she's able to relay the granular, down-to-basics approach to others. However, she's also stubborn, and if giving advice about anything other than swordplay, she tends to default to 'I did it this way, you should try doing that' rather than actually thinking about the situation.

Secondly, the formerly homeless master archer: He's obviously someone who was raised from a very rough place, but if he managed to rise up to Master Archer, he must have either had a stroke of luck or exceptional determination and belief in himself. However, he's likely not going to be polite or especially diplomatic. So here's the points gleaned from his situation:

Impolite and rough in speech
Likely more aware of injustice than most
Proud of how far he's come
Must have a dash of instinctive skill to even get started

This led to me characterising the Master Archer as a bit of an asshole. He managed to eat by using a slingshot to kill pigeons (often domesticated ones used by scholars) to either sell to piemakers or eat himself. Then I considered; how was he such a good shot? Well, it's that he has OCD; he obsesses over trajectory and hates himself completely if he misses.

This in turn led me to make him an asshole. His OCD and skill at killing pigeons make him save up for a bow until eventually, he gets noticed at the city archery tournament. Now he's the Master Archer, and never fails to remind everyone that he started at the bottom and now he's at 'the top' as far as he's concerned. And unlike the swordmaster, he attributes his skill to being himself, not intense training, and due to the fact a mental illness unique to him is part of his skill, he can't actually relay that skill that well to others.

This allows the swordmaster (calm and disciplined, a good teacher, proud and determined) and the master archer (rough and annoying, a bad teacher, but also proud and determined) to act as foils to one another. One got where they did by discipline, the other by raw determination and sheer chance.

As you can see, with this set up, it's just begging for a character in the middle; we have the calm, the emotive, now we need the balance to complete the freudian trio.

So lastly, we have the spymaster/scholar hybrid. He came from an abusive family, yet rose up to become a 'wisdom', a position that requires a lot of mentally-demanding tasks. However, he wasn't supposed to inherit the job from his mentor as early as he did; that was due to his mentor dying early. So from this basic scaffold we can derive:

He's intelligent, but not necessarily wise
He regularly relies on information provided by others, and easily delegates
He has an uneasy relationship with intimacy
He's not fully qualified for his position and knows it

I then looked at what I wanted for his abusive past. In the end, abandoned mother and abusive father (abusing him for preferring academics to military pursuits) fit the bill, and in that case, what would motivate him to persist through an academic career with that in mind? Well, it's simple: His mentor and his spy assistant were the closest things to parental figures he ever had.

So, in addition to trusting his spies immensely, once his mentor died it was like losing a father. It would also make him equate his skill at his job with his self-esteem, as he'd likely have little to no attachment to his true father if he began to see his work partners as family.

Once thrust into the position of 'father' on the mentor's death, he would be both overwhelmed and desperately attempt to be the nurturing, paternalistic, understanding figure he (rightly or wrongly) saw his mentor as, only to experience failure after failure. This leads to his present self being undecided; sometimes he's cold and utilitarian, other times he's warm and loving.

However, one thing he always knows is that he's reliant on others' input; his main job is to process the input and come up with an answer that fits everyone, enabling him to act as the balance between the swordmaster and the master archer.

I rambled a fair bit here, but my point is this: Start with a few very bare-bones ideas of what you want your character to be. From there, elaborate, explain out what could have made them the way they were. As you explain and grow them out, you may find (like in these three's case) that they naturally eke out a dynamic between themselves.

And in a team-based story, dynamics and interactions are one of the most, if not the most crucial part of any story.


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