So my writing group just had a meetup this last Saturday and the topic came up with “how do you keep your characters from sounding like each other.”

I am by no means a professional writer but I do have some of my tricks which I hope to share.

I have seen other authors whip out these intensely detailed excel sheets that have everything conceivable about the their characters written upon them. I have thought of trying something like that in my past but it seems far too laborious for me and to be honest “I ain’t got no time for this.”

I take another approach, I do what real authors do, I follow the words of the popular phrase “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” Now I don’t mean outright plagiarism but I do mean take and make something my own. In my most recent NaNoWriMo, in the interest of keeping up with my daily word count, at least I keep trying to tell myself this, I copied a number of characters out of popular culture and “reinvented them” into my story. I used Sheldon Cooper from the television show Big Bang Theory. Now my book has him as part of a military seal team going into to investigate an anomaly of extra dimensional origin. Now I know, or at least suspect, that as zany as the show gets this is never going to be one of the their plot lines. I am free to give him an entirely different name and back history but “reuse” or alter him in such way as to make him mine. When writing the dialogue I just envision Sheldon Cooper and think how would he respond to this situation?

Call it cheating if you will but I argue when was the last time you ever read anything that was truly original? Everything is recycled again in one form or another. Mythic hero archetype anyone?