Editing Tip #4: Consistency in Characters
Hey Story Crafters,
Over the past several posts, I’ve touched on tips that can help you develop memorable main characters and help you keep track of the relationships between characters. I also covered the value of side characters. But say you’ve already got a story (it could be a piece of flash fiction, a short story, or novel-length), and you’re trying to edit your characters. Where do you start?
The main goal you want to keep in mind while reviewing and editing characters is consistency. Consistency is what encourages readers to care about your characters long enough to stick with them for the length of your story. It also helps your readers trust that you, the author, really know your characters and care about their development.
Here are three aspects of your characters that you want to make sure stay consistent throughout your story:
1. Appearance
This detail is probably the easiest to track throughout your story, if you’ve typed it up in a word processor. You can just use the “Find” or “Search” function to track details like hair, eye, and/or skin color, or other appearance details that need to be checked for consistency.
You want to check for appearance consistency, because you don’t want to say your main character has red hair, blue eyes, and dark skin on page one, and then describe them as dark-haired, silver-eyed, and pale a hundred pages later. This is an extreme example, and isn’t likely the kind of inconsistent description that may pop up in your work. But it’s sometimes easy to overlook these simple details, so they’re worth checking.
It’s more likely you’ll need to check for consistency in terms of clothing and accessories, or even the supplies or weapons (if applicable) your characters are equipped with. In the case of a fantasy quest-style story, you need to make sure your characters have stocked up on the necessary supplies and weapons at the start of their journey—or that your characters pick them up at some point during it—so they’ll be able to defeat the villain or boss-level figure that serves as the obstacle blocking them from the end-goal of the quest.
For example, it wouldn’t be good for the main character not to be equipped with the powerful weapon (a Holy Sword-equivalent, if you will) needed to defeat the Villain and restore order to the world, by the time your main character confronts said Villain.
2. Backstory
Backstory is less simple to track in word processors because, if done properly, it should be sprinkled as needed throughout your story. (Refer back to the Editing Tip #3: 3 Steps to Editing Info Dump Passages post.) If you can easily locate chunks of backstory in your narrative, you should consider breaking those chunks into smaller pieces and threading them in.
A character’s backstory—their family structure, social environment, and all of their experiences up until the start of the story—tends to shape their core personality, and therefore their motivations. So it’s important for each character’s backstory to be fully established, and remain consistent.
3. Core Personality and Relationships
Finally, who your characters are and their relationships with each other need to be consistent throughout the story. This does not mean your characters, and their relationships, stay the same (in other words, stagnant). Your characters should grow and evolve over the course of the story, and as they do so, their relationships change as well. But this growth—the before/after comparison—should have a logical, natural progression. Your readers should never, at any point of the story, feel like they suddenly don’t know your characters anymore.
The core personality of your characters fuels their motivations, their reasons for taking action. This in turn influences how they treat their existing relationships with other characters, how they create new relationships, and how those relationships change over the course of the story. This includes gradually developing the traits and/or skills that your main character (or major characters) is established to have during the first conflict event of your story. All of these elements combined help drive the plot forward.
If your characters’ motivations are unclear, then your reader may doubt the reasons a character chooses to act a certain way, or chooses a specific course of action. Inconsistencies in core personality, relationships, and character development may cause your readers to lose trust in you, the writer, to guide them through the story.
Consistency in these three details, especially 2 and 3, should result in a satisfying before/after comparison—in other words, growth or transformation—in your characters for your readers. Staying consistent shows the reader you know and care about your characters, and about the story. They will trust your storytelling ability and stick with you until the end, and hopefully, they’ll come back to read more of your work. :)
Happy writing!
Leah
P.S. If there’s a writing or editing topic you’d like me to touch on, feel free to send in a request!
Announcement: I’ll be taking off this week for Thanksgiving. Tune back in the following week!