Developing a couple drafts for a creative project that's been simmering in the back of my mind for years and it's very much a pretty standard genre fare in military sci-fi with characters that are in a specops fireteam doing wetwork operator shit fightin' evil aliens that want to wipe out humanity
The more I flesh out the plot and characters in my head, the more I feel like I'm relying on trope-y plots and character types, and was wondering if anyone has advice on how to write characters that fulfill the role of a stock character type in that kind of story that still have some depth and personality that isn't just "the no nonsense leader," "wiseass with a heart of gold" "gentle giant" "stoic man of few words with a tragic past" "bad bitch that's got something to prove" "antsy pessimist that's worried the Intel's off and the op's gonna go sideways" etc
I'm working on names and personalities and character designs and they're starting to feel like they're starting to come together and I have a sense of their interpersonal dynamics, but I keep feeling like it's starting to get too derivative or predictable and feel like the beats for bringing out some characterization naturally with incidental dialogue as the plot unfolds or little character details or moments seem too shoehorned and was wondering if any writers have some tips for how to add some of that color to a script that feels natural to the genre and momentum of a story without being like "and NOW I'll add some depth to character x before we move on"
Thanks in advance
Use real life. The pain and suffering in your soul from disappointment or rejection or hatred or ambition. Your characters have that too.
plus they kill aliens and doesn't afraid of anything
(thanks haha. I have my characters and story outline figured out, now I'm trying to get a feel for the characters dynamics with each other and a feel for dialogue. Writing good dialogue feels difficult to me, this is probably gonna take multiple drafts and rewrites)
Worldbuilding
Characters
Dialogue
Three totally different things that require totally different kinds of thinking. The same rules don't apply across them.
I'm prone to being mean to myself for feeling inadequate at creative projects but I guess going 2/3 so far would be pretty good if this were baseball lol