Tip Tuesday

    Have you ever read a book that had so many characters that you kept forgetting who was who and what so special about them?  Lots of characters can be fun to write about, but you want to make sure your reader can tell them apart.  How can this be done?  One way is to make their circumstances and who (or what) they are very unique.  Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a good example of this.  In the first book, Frodo has a dizzying amount of companions with him through part of the book.  There is Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Aragorn, Pippin, Merry, and Sam.  That's a lot of characters to keep track off and tell apart.  However, most of them are fairly easy to keep straight.  Gandalf is a wizard.  Legolas is an elf.  Gimli is a dwarf.  Aragorn is the rightful heir of Gondor (he is also the other main character in the books).  And Boromir is the slightly suspicious character who comes from Gondor.  All of those are easy to tell apart.  The hobbits are a bit more tricky, but you can usually keep them straight as well.  Now, imagine if they had been all hobbits or all men or all elves?  That would be so confusing.  
    Another way to help readers to tell your characters apart is simply by using nicknames.  Have you ever read the Sugar Creek Gang books?  Each one of the boys in the gang had a nickname (Circus, Poetry, Dragonfly, etc.).  As soon as you read the nickname it would immediately draw your mind to what character it referred to, making it easy to tell them apart.
    You may not think that your characters all run together, but remember, you are the author, of course they don't seem to run together to you.  You created them. :)  
    Hopefully this was helpful to you.  Have fun writing!