So my story has two MCs, right (not human)? One of them is a wide eyed idealist timid boy and the other is a brave and headstrong girl. Now the boy remains timid, but slowly ceases to be a wide eyed idealist and gains in knowledge. The girl started out brave and headstrong (and a tad defiant) but.....The more I think about her lines and her personality....well, her first appearance I think shows how tough she really is, including her somewhat defiant attitude towards the one who's raising her, HOWEVER.....because I kept switching between MCs, I think I let the boy's timidity (timidness?) bleed into her. I feel like she ceased to be the tough character and became more of....well a STEREOTYPICAL (I put that in caps so you'd notice) little girl, just without the STEREOTYPICAL caring about her appearance thing. She's training physically so she can be a better combatant (the females of her race are stronger and more aggressive than the males....plus the boy is no fighter), but I feel like that tough character is gone and a soft side is showing (for a while she thought the boy was dead, when she found out he was alive, she decided to train to one day be with him (since they're the last of their tribe), and now....I don't know, I guess I feel like I lost that headstrong character). I was writing a scene after a four year time skip and noticed that a scene that I'd planned for a while had her resolving it while being very timid and it's only when I was writing her saying 'please stop' in a timid way for the third time (the first time happened when the one raising her was choking her (there's a whole thing here), the second time was when the one raising her was killing two creatures that she'd convinced the girl were evil (although the girl wasn't convinced) and the third time was when a stranger attacked her and nearly revealed her identity in a crowd) that I realized what I'd done. When I changed the scene so she handled it bravely, I THEN realized....wait, this is a MASSIVE change over her previous scenes. I now realized I have to go back and edit her scenes to get rid of the bleedthrough. Anyone else notice a problem like this in their writing?
I've read of an author struggling to get the right "hopefulness" into a scene, it kept coming out tearful. So then she took off the dismal music she was playing, and put on something more upbeat. Job done! Put on "Eye of the Tiger"!
Heheh, I try to avoid listening to music as I find it distracting I've also been writing the character who was taking care of the girl and found that she didn't change throughout. In the end of the story, she ends up betraying the villain to save her 'pet' (she considers the girl an animal). The thing is, is that bit by bit, she's valuing her 'pet' in a way she doesn't realize and is loving her in a way she doesn't understand (she's beginning to see her as a person). I realized that during her segments, she's not showing any change that would convince the reader that the ending would've happened, so I'm going back and doing some changes to her as well (in addition to adding a scene I might have to cut later for word count purposes).
I've noticed a few problems like this in my writing, absolutely true. Sometimes, some of my characters completely change. Though it's usually intentional for me, there are some cases that I have to change an entire scene because it doesn't sound right. But I've never actually gotten to the point where I have to revise the entire story to change the character.
