Writing with Different Colors

What idiosyncrasies do your unique characters have? It’s easy to get lost on a page with black text on white or cream paper. It’s also easy to make every character sound the same.

We writers don’t want things to be like this. It defeats the purpose of having a cast.

Each character needs to have their distinct viewpoint, experiences, and life philosophies. One of my characters in the Orchestrylus Odyssey, Violeste Allegrette, is a tough-as-nails instructor when it comes to playing the violin as a weapon. Since she shares the same weapon as the main character, it’s fun to explore how they differ.

Stanzielle is cocky, but she plays freely without regard to form.

 Violeste is a stickler for perfect form. Every millistave counts when Stanzielle places her fingers on the fingerboard. The arch, the pressure, how tight she grips her bow, and even how much she polishes Stellatina are of the utmost importance.

Stanzielle thinks alucinized instruments need no such care, seeing them as divine gifts from Eyn Soph. What could be the point of polishing an ethereal instrument?

Violeste thinks of instruments as fine art, but simultaneously, she sees them for the weapons they are.

Instruments are deadly in the world of the spheres. There’s no such thing as a sword, or gun, or anything like that. Instruments inclined to bass are the heavy firepower, while elegant instruments like the violin or acoustic guitars offer a more graceful way to end a life, akin to a sword versus a gun dynamic in our world.

Stanzielle is still young, only seventeen repeats old, so she doesn’t grasp the gravity of wartime as much as a battle-hardened veteran like Violeste. While Stanzielle views her weapon as whimsical and free, Violeste views her own weapon as decisively quick to get to the point of combat.

Timbre is a saxophone wielder and keeps an air of mystery about how he can use an alucinized instrument when the Ensemble sealed his original ability three repeats prior to the events of the first book.

A man needs his secrets, after all.

He’s the oldest member of the party, followed by Violeste, with Stanzielle and Tenoria Waltz being the youngest. This old and new generation interplay makes for more dynamic dialogue and psyche exploration.

A new character in my next novel, Lutee, is in between the extremes but leans closer to the age of the protagonist.

Every one of these characters has a different experience level in life.

The older Timbre is far more conservative and conventional about his views, which he’s instilled in his granddaughter from an early age. But that doesn’t mean blindly following the tenets of the Ensemble either. Since he’s now an outsider, he has a complicated relationship with the Ensemble as an entity in Orchestrylus.

The characters in the Ensemble also have their own views and methods, which might sometimes align with the main characters’ goals, other times, not so much.

I thought it would be interesting to have a religious body that isn’t the trope of “we’re evil because we’re a church.” They’re a neutral force in this world, taking no sides in the wars being fought on behalf of freedom or hard imperialism.

Each of the Maestuses has their own notes on the staff, some of them agree with the main cast, and most of them are antagonistic to their goals.

Think of it like a rainbow. One color does not make a rainbow. But when you have every color, every individual arch of that pristine sign in the sky calls out to you.

That’s how characters and their views need to be. They need to be all sorts of colors so that a rainbow of a story can be made.