Building Backgrounds and POV

The past few days I've run into yet another stumbling block on the short story I am working on. It revolves around a problem I actually have fairly often when writing. It focuses around the relationships between characters and character development. I find that to myself, my characters tend to seem very similar to each other and often this becomes a problem. When the characters are all similar then the answers to problems are essentially a given. There is no suspense, sense of growth, or variety. This problem also carries over to character's reactions to events in the story; if they all react the same way then what's the point of writing the story in the first place?

So that brings us to my brainstorm last night. There are two ways that I feel I need to constantly remind myself when writing a particular scene: One is to anchor a scene with a character in mind, and the other is to keep in mind the background of the characters involved. When a scene is anchored to a certain character that allows the writer to easily draw upon that character's insights, experiences, and characteristics and avoids the risk of having a scene become so scattered that the reader loses track of who is the central focus. Now sometimes of course a scene must be written by switching from character to character but if so it should be handled carefully and very clearly. Anchoring a character can also be used as a plot device as you can hide key elements to the story in plain sight or avoid writing a very tedious but key scene elsewhere. In my own case using anchoring in my short story allows me to keep the focus on the main character and her conflict both inner and outer without hopelessly expanding the story to include everyone else. The problem with rich characters is that they too have their own stories begging to be told!

Now anchoring a character also leads to the second item: a good background. When you anchor a scene in a story to a particular character (or set of characters) you then are able to draw upon who that character is and what they represent. This requires a sort of understanding of who they are. Now like any good argument sometimes you do not get around to formulating an argument until all the research is done. Sometimes you do not really know who a character is until you've done the work of working out their defining history. As I said above sometimes my characters have been flat when compared to each other (and I hope this will change). By concentrating on their backgrounds I can then tweek them into a variety of people. I can build the differences into my characters and thus populate my stories with a wide range of personalities that can clash or mesh.

To help with this, a friend of mine came up with a simple format for a story reader that sparked this idea. Simply put you look at the setting(s) of the story, the plot, the characters individually, and then the character's relationships to each other. This allows the writer to see in a condensed and focused format, how the characters interact and fit into the story. This allows you to hopefully see the similarities and differences between characters and how to build them into unique pieces to your story. It forces the writer to really consider what makes their characters different by boiling away all the story around them. By looking at the characters under a microscope their personalities can be clarified and give the writer answers as to how a character will view, react, and feel about a given scene or event. Now I do not mean to say this is the only way to go about this but I have found it useful. And I also do not mean to claim that this will make me (or others) into a perfect writer but it should help organize my thoughts and writing to a finer point. Hopefully whoever reads this will find a similar thought process useful. Any other thoughts or advice would always be welcome. I realize that this is a shorter than usual post, but I feel that the content is something that can really be expanded through commentary. In short I feel that this post (and my posts in general) to be premises for further discussion, tips of icebergs.