If one is writing stories short on plot, character development is often critical. That raises the issue of character differentiation and how to go about it.
In that vein, here is an interesting quote from a May 14, 2018, New Yorker article on rapper Post Malone.
"Some people are free to live their best lives. Others are just trying to live."
It's an overly stark distinction, some may argue. Perhaps, but useful nonetheless. When creating a character, one might keep that differentiation in mind and think about into which camp the person basically falls. A lot of how a character is constructed can follow from that.
Well, of course there are many shades of gray within each camp and perhaps an interesting border region between the two. If a character, perhaps because of circumstances or perhaps because of agency or lack of it. moves from one zone to the other, would his or her persona change?
I've written about other ways to differentiate character in earlier posts. For instance, in this post I talked about how novelist George Saunders first imagines a voice and how character can follow from that. And then here, I discussed how three dissimilar interpretations of the same song can be used to help define character.
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