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🥑 do your characters stink?

🥑 do your characters stink?

character consistency, part 1

Addison Horner
July 07, 2025

“I generally love revisions, but it frustrates me when character dynamics refuse to come together over a book. I’m thinking right now of a particular character, who I love, but who’s consistently been a struggle to portray well in my books. When there’s a disconnect between a character and your reader’s experience, it can feel very defeating and a little overwhelming. Usually it just takes tweaking dialogue and a couple lines of exposition to lead them in the right direction, but in the moment it can feel impossible!”

- Emma Hill, author of All for Mage and Melody

How do you keep characters consistent?

Character change over the course of a story, which is why I love how Emma used the word “dynamics” above. Dynamic = changing.

Characters are on a journey from here to somewhere else. But that journey has to make sense to the reader to the point where they say, “I’m invested.”

This week, let’s iron out the wrinkles in your characters’ journeys.

First step: identify the problem!

Think of a character from your current WIP who isn’t clicking for you (or your editor, or your beta readers, or your dog).

Identify one or more moments in your WIP that illustrate this problem for your character. Moments include:

Pieces of dialogue
Actions
Thoughts
Responses
Decisions
Emotionality

Importantly, we’re not focusing on both sides of a discrepancy, but on the moments that rub against your reader’s instincts.

Once you have your moment (or list of moments), describe the problem(s) in a short sentence (or several). Those sentences might look like this:

[dialogue] didn’t feel honest.
[action] contradicted how they felt two scenes ago.
[decision] felt unearned according to my beta readers.

Feedback from editors and readers is such a huge part of this process. They can see the things you’ve blinded yourself to after reading the same words a hundred times.

On Wednesday: foundational solutions.

Have a question about your characters? Send me a message and I may feature your dilemma in a future newsletter.

Thanks for reading Avocado Bites!

^{Avocado Bites is a publication of Avocado Tree Press, LLC, that helps you revise your stories one bite at a time. We love working with indie and traditionally published authors on fiction manuscripts—and if that’s you, welcome to our target audience.}

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