Hello an welcome back.

Another post for today I would like to give some tips on making quirky characters. These can be supporting characters or simply giving a main character a quirk of their personality.

Let’s face it, we all have our individual character or personality quirks. It therefore makes sense that we should give some to our characters. So how to do that then?

Tip One: Use the person’s dialogue. It could be a repeated phrase that the character uses or a mannerism unique to that person’s upbringing or region from where they grew up. Or there education level.

A professor of English is more likely to use long winded words while someone who had to quit school for employment to help support their family is more likely to not do so.

There are also certain phrases that are unique to professions. A photographer will likely talk about F-stops or bracketing a set up. Do you know what these mean? If not research the terms to make your character believable.

Tip Two: A person could have an annoying habit like always constantly tapping their fingers or feet. If you live with or know a drummer you can probably relate. A way to have this is to do what I have recommended in the past is list ten possible habits that a character could have. Use some of your own or of those of people you know. And then use the best one or two.

This can create a great way to create conflict between characters. It doesn’t necessarily have to be major conflict as in a drop down knuckle dragging brawl. But it can give you a lot of fun with the exchange between your characters.

Tip Three: Another thing to do would be to give the character a fear of something mundane. If you’ve ever watched the Indiana Jones movies you would know that Indiana Jones hates snakes. This is admittedly not totally mundane, some snakes are obviously dangerous like rattlers or pythons. You could have the character scared of something that would be harmless.

In the snake fear one, it is totally understandable that someone would be scared of a cobra, but what if he has the same fear of a harmless garter snake?

Another fun thing to do would be have some guy who acts like he’s some sort of tough guy through weight training and martial arts but is terrified of mice. An animal that weighs what one of his toes weigh.

This could create a lot of fun for how your characters react to each other.