What Makes Us Unique?

I was recently discussing character with one of my mentees and I was asking them if they thought their characters came across as sufficiently unique. They shook their head. Then they asked me what they could do about it. My response was to get them thinking about themself – ‘What makes you unique?’ ‘I don’t think I am unique,’ they told me. But the thing is we are all wonderfully unique on so many levels. Human beings are complicated and messy and multi-faceted and nuanced, and when it comes to creating fictional characters that is the challenge (and the opportunity) ahead of us. We want characters that live and breathe and die in their uniqueness. Whether we’re writing a hundred-word microfiction or writing a two-hundred-thousand word epic, we generally want our characters to have something about them that is different to any character that has ever existed before. But how do we achieve this? What are the different layers we might consider? Since I’ve been doing a lot of pondering about character for several different reasons just recently (in the aforementioned discussion with my mentee, in my Colourful Characters course, and GULP(!), because I’ve started writing another novel), I thought this might be a good focus for my craft article for May.

Layers of uniqueness

Ok, so a character generally needs something about them that is unique. Sometimes, this is easy to conjure up because the character leans into those realms that some of us might consider to be “weird” – they are an octogenarian who spends their morning hanging upside down from the climbing frame in their garden; they are a new mother who sings heavy-metal nursery rhymes to their baby. But most characters are going to be closer to what we might consider “normal”. Their uniqueness is more nuanced. There isn’t one thing all by itself that makes them unique, but a collection of differences.

It’s a bit like a game of “Guess Who.” We ask questions of ourselves. Does my character wear glasses? Does my character have a beard? Does my character like anchovy and gooseberry jam sandwiches? Does my character cry when a penguin falls over on the ice? Does my character carry around a chess piece in their handbag? We keep asking questions until we have separated them from everyone else on the “Guess Who” board. And in terms of what questions we might ask, I suggest thinking in categories – appearance, personality, history, relationships, behaviour, possessions, desires, voice, perspective etc. These, for me, create different layers of uniqueness.

Uniqueness of appearance

The most superficial way that we identify uniqueness is in physical appearance. What are a character’s physical traits that start to make them lifelike in a reader’s mind? Even in the most epic of novels, we don’t have time to describe every physical detail of every character, and certainly not in microfiction or flash, but a well chosen description can do so much as Amy Barnes demonstrates in “Love Her Tender” (Amy Barnes | -ette Review). In the opening sentence, we are told that Mama is “shoeless and wearing her favorite orange and pink floral housecoat with the snaps askew and her Priscilla pompadour hair pinned up with autumn leaves and cassette-ribbon snarls of Elvis songs.” This is such a startling image and I get such a clear picture of this woman from this triangulation of details – (1) the lack of shoes, (2) the precise description of that housecoat, and (3) the evocation of her hair. She is already unique inside my mind.

Uniqueness of personality

Another aspect of what makes us unique is our personality. There’s a resource on my website called the “Character Creator” and that has a section within it called “Quality Scales” – where is your character on a scale of ambitious to unambitious? Where is your character on a scale of brave to cowardly? The more qualities you start to consider, the more nuanced and unique your character will become. Elsewhere in that resource, there’s a section called “Personality Test” which starts to broaden out into likes and dislikes, another element of what makes our personalities unique.

Uniqueness of history

Where we are in this moment right now is deeply affected by everything we’ve lived through. Things that happened in our early childhood shape the person we are today whether we’re aware of that or not. Our personal history and the way it has affected us is as unique as our fingerprints, and the more a writer has figured out what happened to their character before the particular story they are telling, the more three-dimensional the character tends to be. I love how Hema Nataraju brings in the wider context of her two characters in “On the Moral High Ground” (Hema Nataraju | Emerge Literary Journal). We are told that Joon’s father made coffee for his step-mother every morning but never for his mother, and this is an important detail that affects how Joon acts in the present. We are told that “Henna has moved a lot since childhood. An army brat who’s not really a brat”, again an important detail that affects her present actions. Sometimes when I read stories in my editing work, I come across pieces that are overburdened with backstory and that is something to watch out for, but here the balance between too much and too little feels just right.

Uniqueness of relationships

Another thing that defines us are our relationships – family, friends, wives, husbands, ex-partners, colleagues, enemies, pets – there’s a lot to think about, and for each of those relationships, what is it that makes the relationship unique? The way each mother connects with each child, for example, is completely different. It is about finding their shared story as Alison Wassell demonstrates so well in “Superman Smiles” (Alison Wassell | Free Flash Fiction). To me, it feels as though I know exactly how this mother-son duo operate together, not just in this scene but in life more generally and that, I think, is what you want to create with any fictional relationship.

Uniqueness of behaviour

One of the techniques that is used to great effect in “Superman Smiles” is body language. The son “looks at [the mother] with his good eye as the other slides sideways” – this is such a unique description, and the way we behave, the way we react to things that take place around us is another layer of what makes us unique. Similarly, I love the way that the pretty cowgirl in “In All The Loveless Places” (Jennifer McMahon | Fractured Lit) “aims her pearl-handled pistols high and pow-pows at the fragile moon” – this is a character behaving in her own unique fashion.

Uniqueness of possessions

Next, I come to possessions. What do you have in your pockets? What do you carry around in your bag? What is the furniture and decoration in your bedroom? What are the apps that you’ve got on your phone? We all own different things and what we own says a lot about us. Sometimes, picking out a single possession can do so much to unearth the uniqueness of a particular character. Or why not go the full hog and create an entire piece that focuses around the objects from a person’s life as Kik Lodge does in “What the dead take with them” (Kik Lodge | Milk Candy Review). In this piece, each item not only brings the character to life, it also evokes the central relationship and takes the story forward.

Uniqueness of desire

What does your character want? What are their dreams? What are their ambitions? What are their expectations? On the flip side of this, what are their fears? This is another part of what makes us unique. It overlaps in part with the uniqueness of our personalities, but it is also separate to that. It includes that story element of motivation – what is driving a character both within the story and more globally? Can you make this completely unique?

Uniqueness of voice

Last year I mentioned the U word in an article about voice, and voice is certainly another layer of what makes a character unique. Everyone’s accent is different. Everyone’s vocabulary is different. The way we choose to express things is different. This is particularly relevant when writing in first-person. What does this character sound like? I love the voice in “A Friendly Confession” (Lori Cramer | Fictive Dream) because from the way it lands on the page, I can start to picture what sort of character this is. Other example stories with wonderful tone of voice can be found here: https://www.mattkendrick.co.uk/_files/ugd/cc8ca6_bd02d26f008d4c859c68c2fa0f753712.pdf

Uniqueness of perspective

Finally, I come to perspective. The unique way we see the world. In the “Science of Storytelling”, Will Storr describes it like this:

“A character in fiction, like a character in life, inhabits their own unique hallucinated world in which everything they see and touch comes with its own unique personal meaning.”

That reference to a “hallucinated world” makes it sound very science fiction, but this apparently is the reality of what are brains are doing – we are creating our own picture of what we imagine the world around us is like; we are hearing a sound and decoding it into something that makes sense to us; we are smelling a smell and doing similar.

Then there is the way we interpret the unfamiliar. If a caveman saw a jumbo jet flying above his head, how might he describe it? When considering perspective in my Colourful Characters course, I often find myself asking course participants stuff like “What does a woodpigeon know and what don’t they know? Do they know about Barbie dolls and quadratic equations?”

Bringing everything together

So, there you are – an incomplete list of what makes us and our characters unique. Hopefully, this article is something you can consult when trying to make your characters stand out from the crowd. Depending on the size of your story, the amount of detail you bring in will obviously vary, but I think the most lifelike characters are those where the writer knows more about them than what appears on the page and where the layers of uniqueness start to overlap like in “What I Wish She Knew” (Brian Mcvety | JMWW)

Taking things further

Want to ponder on all of this a bit more? This is a great post from

Emma Darwin

on how you can go about getting to know your characters. Tommy Dean at

Flash Perspectives

has written a great article about using character intentions to create scenes. And here’s an article at Fetish Literature on character motivations and ideologies.

I’ve referenced some of the resources on my website above. You can see all the resources here, but the most pertinent to building unique characters will probably be the “Body Language Bible” and the “Character Creator”.

Finally, why not spend two weeks writing with me in August on my Colourful Characters course? This course is a deep exploration of how we can conjure unique and unforgettable characters, thinking about techniques to evoke body language, sensory detail and voice.

Recent publications

Banana republic (BULL Magazine)

People Present on Carnaby Street on a Saturday Afternoon in Early May (Fractured Lit)

Trevor (Emerge Literary Journal)

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