I have a type. Not in the romantic sense, though probably in that sense too, but in the writing sense. Every character I’ve ever put on a page has the same energy underneath them, regardless of what they look like or where they live or what the story asks of them. Restless. A little guarded. Funny in a way that’s sometimes a defence mechanism. Quietly observing a room before deciding whether to fully enter it.
I noticed this about three projects in and spent a decent amount of time feeling embarrassed about it.
Then I kept writing and eventually figured out that it doesn’t matter. Not even slightly. In fact I’d go further: the writers I love most are doing exactly the same thing, and the consistency is part of what makes them worth reading.
Think about the writers you return to. Not just for individual books but as a body of work, a whole world. There’s almost always a recognisable sensibility across everything they make. A particular kind of loneliness that keeps showing up. A specific flavour of humour. A way of writing about families, or cities, or the gap between who people are and who they’re trying to be. You could lift a paragraph from one book and place it beside a paragraph from another written twenty years later and see the same mind at work.
That’s not repetition. That’s a voice. And a voice takes a very long time to build, mostly because it’s built by writing the same concerns over and over from slightly different angles until you start to understand what you were actually circling.
The character who keeps coming back is not a failure of imagination. They’re evidence of an obsession, and obsessions are where the interesting writing lives. Nobody writes well about things they’re mildly curious about. You write well about the things you can’t stop thinking about, can’t fully resolve, keep returning to from different directions because you haven’t cracked them yet.
The recurring character is the question you’re still asking. Every book is another attempt at the answer.
Some writers spend entire careers on one question and never fully resolve it and that’s fine too, maybe even better, because the writing that comes out of genuine unresolved preoccupation has a quality that tidy resolution rarely does. It stays open. It lets the reader in.
The version of this advice I wish I’d had earlier is simple: stop apologising for your obsessions and start trusting them. If the same character keeps showing up, follow them. If the same themes keep surfacing, go deeper into them rather than away from them. The things you can’t stop writing about are the things you have something to say about, even if you don’t know yet exactly what that is.
You’re not writing the same character over and over because you lack range. You’re writing them over and over because they’re the lens through which you see. And the job isn’t to keep changing lenses. It’s to keep looking.
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