I said it Tuesday, I'll say it again: I love it when writing is like real life. There's awkwardness, people speak like they normally do, there are people of different races, ethnicities, and cultures, sexualities. The world is a beautiful, complex, random cosmos inside our enormous universe.
Characters are my babies. I love them. They're one of my favorite portions of a book or a piece of literature besides writer's craft. How else do you get another person's thoughts, feelings, dreams, and ideas into your head? You never see someone else's perspectives like you do when you read a book. You go through life with really only your perspective of the way the world turns, hearing about others' but not really living them. This is one of the reasons that books have endured for centuries, they do things for us that nothing else can.
But back to characters.
Giving characters 'quirks' is always a goal for a writer, because that makes them stand out. There are literally millions of characters who have brown hair, blue eyes, pale skin, or who are strong or smart or a jock with a soft side or a badass with a sad backstory. How are these characters to ever find a way to stand out from the others? By their own little neuroses, that's how. Maybe a love interest hates being cliche and always shows affection in the strangest ways possible so as to be 'original', or one always night showers or walks in the early morning outside to be by themselves. It's the little tidbits that aren't relevant to the plot that make them breathe.
Finding out things about a character depend on how you meet your characters. For me, it's almost like I run into them on the street as I'm out doing whatever I'm doing, where they look a certain way, speak a certain way, and have a name before they introduce me. I'm not scrambling to build them like in a Sims game, like some authors. They come as they already are, and so for me finding their little quirks is about getting to know them. Some authors need to carefully plot out each hair on their protagonist's head, but that's not me. We're a varied breed, writers.
The problem with these quirks are the balance of them. Too much, and your character is suddenly a manic pixie dream girl (or boy) that seems to not be able to hold a conversation or live conventionally due to his or her neuroses. Too little, and they appear contrived, deliberate, pretentious...like they're trying too hard to seem normal. Let their humor sneak into dialogue for the sake of them speaking, have someone trip up their need to color-code their closet and see what happens. Not every piece of a character is relevant to propelling the plot forward. Not every detail of our lives comes into play significantly. If it were true, we wouldn't be characters or people: we'd be puppets, doing what entertains our puppet master and disregarding free will. Which I'd hate for that to happen.
I'll keep this brief, because my last couple were super long. But moral of the story, characters are fictional humans (or whatever they're meant to be). We can make them as perfect and neat as we'd like, but they're boring that way. Give a girl frizzy hair. Give a guy an inability to mismatch his socks. Make them laugh, cry, smile, crack jokes because they are people and need air and want to be known. Let them come alive, and readers will go nuts. And maybe, just maybe, you can bring us one step closer to the world on the page.
Meet-and-greets and tea parties with fictional characters,
Brie
Characters are my babies. I love them. They're one of my favorite portions of a book or a piece of literature besides writer's craft. How else do you get another person's thoughts, feelings, dreams, and ideas into your head? You never see someone else's perspectives like you do when you read a book. You go through life with really only your perspective of the way the world turns, hearing about others' but not really living them. This is one of the reasons that books have endured for centuries, they do things for us that nothing else can.
But back to characters.
Giving characters 'quirks' is always a goal for a writer, because that makes them stand out. There are literally millions of characters who have brown hair, blue eyes, pale skin, or who are strong or smart or a jock with a soft side or a badass with a sad backstory. How are these characters to ever find a way to stand out from the others? By their own little neuroses, that's how. Maybe a love interest hates being cliche and always shows affection in the strangest ways possible so as to be 'original', or one always night showers or walks in the early morning outside to be by themselves. It's the little tidbits that aren't relevant to the plot that make them breathe.
Finding out things about a character depend on how you meet your characters. For me, it's almost like I run into them on the street as I'm out doing whatever I'm doing, where they look a certain way, speak a certain way, and have a name before they introduce me. I'm not scrambling to build them like in a Sims game, like some authors. They come as they already are, and so for me finding their little quirks is about getting to know them. Some authors need to carefully plot out each hair on their protagonist's head, but that's not me. We're a varied breed, writers.
The problem with these quirks are the balance of them. Too much, and your character is suddenly a manic pixie dream girl (or boy) that seems to not be able to hold a conversation or live conventionally due to his or her neuroses. Too little, and they appear contrived, deliberate, pretentious...like they're trying too hard to seem normal. Let their humor sneak into dialogue for the sake of them speaking, have someone trip up their need to color-code their closet and see what happens. Not every piece of a character is relevant to propelling the plot forward. Not every detail of our lives comes into play significantly. If it were true, we wouldn't be characters or people: we'd be puppets, doing what entertains our puppet master and disregarding free will. Which I'd hate for that to happen.
I'll keep this brief, because my last couple were super long. But moral of the story, characters are fictional humans (or whatever they're meant to be). We can make them as perfect and neat as we'd like, but they're boring that way. Give a girl frizzy hair. Give a guy an inability to mismatch his socks. Make them laugh, cry, smile, crack jokes because they are people and need air and want to be known. Let them come alive, and readers will go nuts. And maybe, just maybe, you can bring us one step closer to the world on the page.
Meet-and-greets and tea parties with fictional characters,
Brie
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