Quote: Martin H @ March 10 2009, 11:01 PM GMTDifferentiating between characters is a problem lots of new writers have. Giving each character a unique voice. There is the old trick of covering up the characters names and still being able to tell each character apart just by their dialogue, but with a lot of new writers the characters often begin to blend in to each other.
I had that problem when I very first started writing. I usually had the main character fleshed out and you could easily tell them apart from everyone else. But the secondary characters often molded in to each other and became too similar with no real defined voice.
It is something I'm much better at now, I like to think I can write a whole host of characters and give each of them enough depth and personal flavour to stand out from one another.
It's also a problem seasoned writers have, not just beginners. To combat it your first instinct is to go for basic personality differences, so you'll have a clever one, a sexy one, a thick one etc. But that often feels too manufactured, so it's difficult to find a happy medium.
And sometimes you do find successful characters with very similar voices that on the page would be hard to differentiate between. Ab Fab's Patsy and Edina spring to mind.
