Sometimes I have to completely stop working on a story and get my head on straight because some characters should never be allowed to come within swinging distance of each other's POV. That isn't to say I can't write them together, even in the same scene; that is to say that I cannot get under both of their skins without expecting some seriously inappropriate meshing.
Today, I got under Shift's skin. I wasn't intending to, but her story's next in the Kingdoms and Thorn universe and she owns Justus and she's serious business and headed up the entire rebellion and just about owns the city she lives in. She also happens to be Rachelle's leader and heavily invested in the future of all of her team members. So naturally, writing about Rachelle and Justus requires a bit of awareness of Shift. After all, their relationship is a literal side effect of his relationship with Shift.
But therein lies the problem. They have a similar worldview, similar chip on their shoulder, similar morals, and rather similar way of relating to Justus. Different, but similar. Rachelle wasn't sounding quite right when I wrote her, not because she and Shift don't talk similarly to outsiders, but because they don't talk the same. The outside makes it easy to forget that the inside is totally and completely different.
Portraying these girls is a dissection of their coping mechanisms and their walls, and in that, they are opposites.
Shift is so passionate and self-sacrificing that she's willing to do literally anything for those she loves and protects. Which means she's an extremely dangerous woman because that leaves a lot of atrocities she doesn't flinch at. She keeps people from getting too close or too deep by being friendly, sociable, and perfectly whatever makes them comfortable. When she's just being herself though, she's got a razor edge of all that dangerousness showing through the sociability.
Rachelle coped by turning off. She's cynical and fatalistic and survivalist. She gets along by not caring. If she does care about you, she's let you in pretty deep, I'll tell you that. Her wall is a razor edge, but when she's really just being herself, she's light and easy and usually not too intense unless she's depressed, which is rare.
They both don't care enough about themselves to not be self-sacrificing, but for totally different reasons. So I haven't been able to write Rachelle today. I'm still flushing Shift from my system.
Do you ever get characters meshing when they're not supposed to? How do you deal with it?
