Same Riff, Never the Same Solo

 How do you come up with character personality sketches for your books—do you plunge in and let your characters develop on the page, use real-life people as inspiration, or turn to personality frameworks like the enneagram? Especially for those who’ve written a lot—how do you keep new characters from looking like old ones?

First off, I don’t know what an enneagram is. I assume it’s either a personality chart or a Scandinavian death metal band. Either way, I don’t use it.

Explaining creativity is like diagramming a punchline—it only gets less funny the more you pick at it. But here I go.

Characters show up when they want to. Some arrive fully dressed with a name tag and a past. Others sneak in late and mutter. I write until they start talking, then I listen.

Writers are professional eavesdroppers. We steal from bar talk, funerals, waiting rooms, subway and bus rides, or whatever’s going on. We watch people not because we’re nosy—okay, we are—but because human nature is our raw material. Most people are acting. Our job is to catch them when the mask slips.

As for keeping characters from turning into reruns, that’s an architecture problem. You write long enough, types resurface—the liar, the romantic, the bastard with a conscience—but if you’re doing it right, they evolve. Or unravel. It’s jazz: same riff, never the same solo.

And yeah, trauma helps. Not being flippant—life’s traumatic.

We all compartmentalize to survive. Writers just monetize it.

Writing, for me, is part instinct, part discipline, and part con. The trick is discernment—knowing what’s signal and what’s noise. Some call it Talent. I call it knowing when something’s alive on the page, and when it’s just typing.

I started with poetry, which is ironic considering I have a profound hearing loss. But words on the page? They give me sensation—sometimes even color. I hear the music. I’m also obsessed with old films, especially Thirties flicks where the dialogue crackles and the subtext cuts deep on sex and social commentary. Preston Sturges. Early Wilder. Anything with Myrna Loy giving a guy the look that says she already knows the ending.

Writing comedy is harder than murder. Ask anyone who’s tried to write both.

Final thought: writing’s democratic. Everyone gets the same blank page. What’s not democratic? Your relationship to language. That’s the real trick. That’s the one thing no one can fake.