If you’re switching personalities within a character, that character may not be developed enough. Here are some tips to help keep characters consistent:
- Write Bios: Major characters should get more details. Think about where your character is coming from. This will have an impact on how they react to certain situations and how they act in social situations. If you understand a character, you can keep them consistent. Include your character’s moral code. This will help you write decisions your characters may have to make. Their moral code can change throughout the story, which would be part of their character development.
- Look Over Dialogue: When you write dialogue, read it aloud and look it over. Keep your character’s slang consistent. If your character says “going to” in once sentence and “gonna” in another, you have an inconsistency, depending on the social context of those sentences. If a piece of dialogue doesn’t sound like something that character would say or if it’s too unique to another character, change it.
- Beta Readers: Readers will be able to pick out inconsistencies. Find one or more and ask them to pay attention to your characters. They can tell you what they found to be inconsistent or out of character.
- Traits: Keep track of the traits your character has and make a list of contradictions that could exist within those traits. For example, an extremely indecisive character should not make a quick decision in the next chapter. Avoid contradictions like that.
Keeping Consistencies Through Character Development:
If you look at your character at the beginning of the story and at the end, they should not be the same character. However, this is not an inconsistency. This is character development, as long as there’s a reason for the development. They cannot develop just because time passes. There has to be something that changes the character, whether it’s an event, their relationship with another character, or the overall experience they go through during the story.
However, character development doesn’t happen right away. It happens throughout the course of the story, starting with the inciting incident. If it happens too fast, the character will be inconsistent.
If your characters are still inconsistent and you can’t help but switch personalities, step back and develop them more. Find some prompts and write scenes with these characters so that you really know them.
