I'm trying to write a story about a group of people who rob a bank and get away with it, my problem is, how can I develop multiple MCs without making them seem too similar but at the same time similar enough that their relationships seem plausible? Any help?... Please and thank you
While all the characters have one obvious thing in common-- the committing of the robbery-- they will have a thousand plus differences. Different fears and anxieties, backgrounds, expectations, emotional states of mind before during and after the crime etc... You could try writing each chapter with a different POV character. Figure out which one is best suited for what you're trying to accomplish with that chapter, and those differences should come through on the page.
Naiyn hit it on the head. Every so often, too, you can recount the same event looking through someone else's eyes. If you can use that narrative device effectively, it fleshes out motivations, etc, very well, because, let's face it-- we all see the same events through the lenses of our own perspective, yes?
Yes, very true, my favorite author actually practices that. I don't know why I didn't think of that. It nice to have seperate POVs because sometimes the same prospectives gets a little old depending on the story
They don't need to be very similar to work together - they just need to be able to understand each other. They also all need a motivation to rob a bank, but their motivations can be very different. They also need a plausible way to meet and get the idea of robbing a bank together, but the paths they took to get there may be very different for each of them.
To follow on from Islander's post: The great thing is that similarity won't cause conflict here unless they all want to screw each other over when it comes to splitting the loot, and who wants that? Differences in style of robbery will cause great conflict in a robbery. Think about how different people may want to take leadership in different ways. I won't say too much more, lest it sound like I spend a lot of my time planning robberies (I do... quite seriously).
