: Re: I feel like most of my characters are the same, what can I do? If I think about the characters I came up with in my mind so far, I usually get a pretty big list: (Gyvaris (ENTJ), Martha
Your characters have behaviours but not motivations. By defining behaviours first they always behave the same way, but by defining motivations first they can have more lifelike and distinct behaviour.
You say:
Aial and Koldryd share the same "neutral good", helps those around him, kind and understanding type.
But without the motivation you don't have any context to colour those behaviours. Does this behaviour change in a certain scenario, do they disagree sometimes?
Likewise, I see you've added MBTI, but that only defines a way or pattern of thinking (sometimes you can make a leap to a behaviour, or motivation but there is a disconnect).
One good resource I have found for developing character motivations, is this medium article on Magic: the Gathering colours, and how they are used to define characters in their stories.
My last anecdote is about how the color wheel broke me out of writer’s block — I’d been stuck at the same point in my then-one-quarter-finished novel for almost a year when I came across this framework, and I immediately sat down to try to classify all of my characters (as MTG game designer Mark Rosewater often does on his blog, where most of my understanding of this stuff comes from).
I was surprised to discover that, while I had an immediate stereotype about my second- and third-most important characters (red and white/blue/black, respectively) I had no idea what colors my main character was.
Thinking about it for an hour produced a decision (partly based on previous impressions, and partly solidifying and crystallizing those impressions) of green/blue, and I was off. I wrote thirty pages over the next two days, not to mention cleaning up a bunch of loose and random characterization.
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