Guest Blog: Building Character Quirks by Amber Colleen
Pieces of You…Pieces
of Me… Building memorable character
‘quirks’
There are many ways to create a memorable characters, one of
them is to give your characters interesting ‘quirks’. Where do you find unique
and believable personality traits to implement into your character profiles?
Start with yourself, your family, your friends and people who catch your
attention in everyday life.
Yourself – How do
you know if you have any quirks worth writing about? That’s easy. These are the
things about you that family members will joke about, tease you about, find
irritating or funny and are mentioned over and over. As my son and daughter
lovingly point out, I often make jokes that nobody else thinks are funny, and I
laugh and laugh at my own humor. In one of my novels, the protagonist has this same trait and her
quirky way of dealing with intense situations through humorless jokes is a big
part of her character and also enables me, the writer, to express her thoughts
in a engrossing manner.
Another tactic is to incorporate your own hobbies into your
characters as long as it adds to the story. For example, my son and I trained
for 6 years in martial arts and are both black belts. The main character,
Mallory, in my novel Premonitions, also has trained with her son
in martial arts. While in most aspects of her personality, she is a regular
mom, this gives her the tools she needs to fight the terrorists when she finds
herself trapped in a locked down elementary school. Her actions are believable, because she has this background, and I can write intelligently about it because
I know it.
Family Members –
There is an endless supply of personality traits and quirks within your own
family! Every family has those crazy characters that make family dinners and
events entertaining or dramatic. My son, age 13, is a quirky kid. He is very
smart, but common sense is not among his finer qualities. In the novel I am
currently working on, No Such Thing As
Coincidence, the protagonist is a super-genius that can hardly function in
the world outside his brilliant mind. I took my sons lack of common sense and
exploded it into this characters personality. Finding a fun quirk among family
members and blowing it up is a believable way to embed interesting personality
traits into your characters. Be mindful to make sure the quirks you choose for
your characters enrich your story. The super-genius based on my son uses this
quirk for intense concentration he needs in his medical research to cure
diseases.
Keep your eye open for unique ‘quirks’ among your friends
and people you see every day. There is endless material everywhere you look!
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Amber Collen mothers, thrives, and writes in North Carolina and can be found on her website, Facebook Fan Page, and on Twitter via @amber_colleen
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Want to guest blog on this site? Contact Rick at anilyb@earthlink.net .
3 comments:
Amber! Great advice. I’m writing my fifth novel with a female protagonist and am having trouble with this character sounding like all the other protagonists. After reading your blog I realized that in my latest work I’d mentioned that my protagonist was an excellent seamstress and that her first born was a girly-girl but neither of those statements really helped explain or define those characters. Now, I have work to do to go back and show these traits throughout the story.
Thanks! A million ideas are running through my brain.
Shelia...Look at that. You finally got a comment to stick. But I must say I'm disappointed. Only a million ideas! :-)
Write on!
Thanks so much Sheila! Happy writing!
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