Characters and their quirks

I sent out my manuscript for reading and when it returned I wept a little. I honestly debated printing it out physically just to light it on fire. I like symbolism.

One of the comments I received in the early pages was that my characters had moments of life, but then they fell flat. They merged together into one, like clay that wasn’t thrown in the kiln before putting it near other sculptures, so the clay went back together, returning to a natural form.

This led me to soul search in an attempt to figure out how to make each character unique. Obviously there is dialogue, but I’m still tackling this. At the moment, I have each character gaining some sort of pattern they repeat, whether it’s a word or phrase they say at least once a scene (“Old sport” from Jay Gatsby) or sentence structure (“…the dark side of the Force…