Character Cross-Pollination

[scribblemyname]

Sometimes I have to completely stop working on a story and get my head on straight because some characters should never be allowed to come within swinging distance of each other's POV. That isn't to say I can't write them together, even in the same scene; that is to say that I cannot get under both of their skins without expecting some seriously inappropriate meshing.

Today, I got under Shift's skin. I wasn't intending to, but her story's next in the Kingdoms and Thorn universe and she owns Justus and she's serious business and headed up the entire rebellion and just about owns the city she lives in. She also happens to be Rachelle's leader and heavily invested in the future of all of her team members. So naturally, writing about Rachelle and Justus requires a bit of awareness of Shift. After all, their relationship is a literal side effect of his relationship with Shift.

But therein lies the problem. They have a similar worldview, similar chip on their shoulder, similar morals, and rather similar way of relating to Justus. Different, but similar. Rachelle wasn't sounding quite right when I wrote her, not because she and Shift don't talk similarly to outsiders, but because they don't talk the same. The outside makes it easy to forget that the inside is totally and completely different.

Portraying these girls is a dissection of their coping mechanisms and their walls, and in that, they are opposites.

Shift is so passionate and self-sacrificing that she's willing to do literally anything for those she loves and protects. Which means she's an extremely dangerous woman because that leaves a lot of atrocities she doesn't flinch at. She keeps people from getting too close or too deep by being friendly, sociable, and perfectly whatever makes them comfortable. When she's just being herself though, she's got a razor edge of all that dangerousness showing through the sociability.

Rachelle coped by turning off. She's cynical and fatalistic and survivalist. She gets along by not caring. If she does care about you, she's let you in pretty deep, I'll tell you that. Her wall is a razor edge, but when she's really just being herself, she's light and easy and usually not too intense unless she's depressed, which is rare.

They both don't care enough about themselves to not be self-sacrificing, but for totally different reasons. So I haven't been able to write Rachelle today. I'm still flushing Shift from my system.

Do you ever get characters meshing when they're not supposed to? How do you deal with it?

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Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[pygmymuse.livejournal.com]

Now I am curious about Shift.

Yes, I've had meshing. For a while, I was writing up to four stories at a time, and since I have very similar archetypes, they can and do bleed over if I am not careful. I found it better to make the stories different types or different time periods because that helped keep them straighter.

I'm not sure how well I do with avoiding meshes since I was worried about predictability and repetition, but generally I have to work on something unrelated or go back and reread until I'm back in the mindset of the right person. When I did fanfic, I'd rewatch/reread to get it right again.

[scribblemyname]

Ah, Shift. She's a mess and a self-identified monster. I can't help but love her though because I know how she got the way she is. :sigh:

And that's smart, keeping different kinds of stories apart. That works well enough when I'm writing in different continuities now that you mention it. Then I had to just go muck around in the same one. :shakes head at self:

[pygmymuse.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know those characters very well. Many of mine are like that.

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

Oh, characters and their meshing.

That's one of those times I find it incredibly helpful to work with memories and each character's past. There are usually good reasons why they mesh, but I want to know why. So I go on a quest to try to understand it, which isn't a bad thing at all. It's a diversion, but not a bad one. Exploring what brought them to similar places is a good exercise and an enriching one, and understanding how it happened discretely makes it easier to get back to writing them in the present.

(I also call this characters demanding their own turn. No, Laurie Beth, you still can't have your own story.)

[scribblemyname]

Mine always get mixed up on interactions. If they use very, very similar methods and come from a similar background, I start having trouble keeping them apart and have to really just step back and live through them away from each other for a bit.

I found I had to pop into the future because that's where they really diverge, how they interact with people in the aftermath more than the events that made them team members. This morning in bed, I was just thinking through a later period where Rachelle gets experimental (for lack of a better word) and it was so different and just her and just Justus, that I think I've got her straight again.

And hm. No Laurie? How about Marien? :bats eyelashes: (I know. Not helping.)