Keeping Characters Consistent

A lot of times, when writers think about keeping characters consistent, we tend to focus on the externals.  Sure, you need to make sure your character’s eye color stays the same (unless you’re doing something like I did in the Chocoverse, where some characters’ eye color changes depending on their emotions — and then you need the system for how THAT works to stay consistent).  And yes, readers will see plot holes if your left handed character does something that should have been right handed, and they read into it that he was lying, faking something, or pretending to be someone else altogether — and then nothing comes of it, because it was just a mistake.

But even more important, characters need to behave consistently.  Nothing is going to throw a reader out of the story faster than having a character the reader thinks she understands suddenly violate his own moral code.  Or worse, he starts saying contradictory things.  (Again, the reader will probably give you the benefit of the doubt, assuming you are leading up to something.  Maybe this character’s lying, or now it’s his twin brother pretending to be him, or he suffered a head injury we don’t know about.)  But if it turns out that the character was just written inconsistently, we feel let down — and you’ve shattered out illusions that this character was a real person.  Yes, I know, sometimes real people do things erratically, but with fiction, it’s hard to maintain interest in that type of character.  If the character is quirky, even that needs to be written with consistency.