Special guest Bree Despain of the Dark Divine trilogy joins us for a ‘cast on character quirks.

A character quirk, avoiding the tautological definition, is something that makes your character memorable. We talk about good quirks, bad quirks, and how to tell the difference. We also laugh a lot because it was late and we were punchy.

We also discuss ways in which stereotype-breaking quirks can be employed without delivering humor, and reasons why we might do this.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: The Dark Divine by Bree Despain

Regarding That “No Spoilers” Shouting-Match: If you haven’t seen Avatar: The Last Airbender (animated) in its entirety yet, it’s possible Bree gave something away in the last two minutes of the ‘cast.

Writing Prompt: A physical attribute that in some way influences the character’s religion

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Character quirks make character different and memorable. Beware going to far with quirks. Incongruity helps – profession, religion, whatever – square pegs in round holes!

[Bree] I’m Bree Despain.
[Brandon] Yes, we have special guest star, Bree Despain, who is a wonderful writer, who has agreed to come in and be with us here on the podcast. Tell us, just quickly, about yourself, what you do, what you write, that kind of stuff.
[Bree] I write paranormal romance, which is basically horror novels with a little bit less blood and a lot more kissing. My book’s called the Dark Divine trilogy.
[Dan] Or at least the kissing is not inherently disturbing, like in my books.
[Howard] Less blood and more kissing, this sounds like a good life.
[Dan] I want… okay, I’m using that as my next title.
[Brandon] You have to write a book.
[Bree] Less blood and more kissing. Again, Will?

[Brandon] We want to talk about character quirks. We’ve talked a little bit about building characters, we’ve talked about side characters. We want to focus in and narrow in on character quirks. What do we mean by that? We mention it a lot. Dan, why do we use character quirks? What are we even talking about?
[Dan] Well, a character quirk is something that makes your character quirky. It’s something that makes your character different…
[Brandon] oh That, wow, thanks. That’s…
[Dan] I had to say it. Somebody had to say.
[Howard] Fans of the circular definition…
[Dan] Yes. A character quirk is an inherent tautology. A character quirk makes your character different from every other similar character. So for example, if you have the private eye who lives on the mean streets and drinks and does whatever, but also loves puppies and does macrame in his spare time, then he’s suddenly different from every other noir pulp detective.
[Brandon] Okay. Why is that good?
[Dan] That is good because then people will remember him.
[Brandon] Okay. That’s what we’re getting at here. We want to make our characters memorable. Quirks really, in my opinion, are falling into two categories. You’re either making them more identifiable or you’rw making them more memorable, and hopefully doing both at the same time. All right. So we want to talk about good character quirks and bad character quirks. Bree, do you have a character quirk? Does your main character have quirks?
[Bree] Okay. My main character… she has an interesting quirk that she likes to edit other people. Part of it is that she’s a pastor’s daughter. She’s grown up in a family where they’re not supposed to swear and that type of thing. But she edits the people around her, which is kind of interesting because she ends up in the book in these really intense situations. So instead of writing out what the guy’s actually saying to her, like she’s in this scary situation, there’s these guys saying really creepy things to her. She’ll just be like, “And then he said a bunch of stuff that I am not going to repeat.” But it gets to be fun, because I can suddenly come up with like something funny that she says instead of repeating all the foul language that the guys are saying.
[Howard] So it’s… you’re writing in first person, so she is editing other people as she narrates them to us?
[Bree] Yes.
[Howard] That’s cool.

[Brandon] That is an interesting quirk. Howard. Quirks? What have you got going for you? Besides talking pieces of poo?
[Howard] My main character is a walking oral fixation. That’s Schlock. He has got a great big mouth, and that’s just how he explores the world. Now everybody’s uncomfortable that I’ve described him in that way.
[Bree] I’m really glad you explained what that means.
[Brandon] Okay. Why?
[Howard] Sadly, it was discovery writing. I had an amorphous character, and I thought well, what if… because of the nature of amorph biology, his only orifice is his mouth. He doesn’t have a nose. He doesn’t have ears. He doesn’t have a butt. It’s just all mouth. What happens? His character grew from there.
[Brandon] Okay. Before we gross people out any further, we’re going to move on…
[Howard] Maybe I should talk about another character?
[Brandon] How about this? Pitfalls of character quirks?
[Howard] Well, sometimes they end up dirty.

[Brandon] Can you go too far with this?
[Howard] Oh, absolutely.
[Brandon] Wow, that’s a very leading question. It’s a good thing I’m not a reporter.
[Dan] Are you asking us to go too far with this?
[Brandon] No… I’m asking… no. Obviously…
[Dan] I would like to just accept to Howard in the form of how do you keep from going too far with that particular quirk?
[Howard] Um. There’s two rules in writing good comedy. The first is everybody loves a running gag. The second is everybody hates it when you go back to the well too often. The difference between going back to the well and a good running gag is all execution. I look at the jokes that I make about Schlock and his mouth, and if they are genuinely funny because they are funny, then I’ll go ahead and use them. If they’re funny because, “Oh, ha ha, another mouth joke,” then it’s not really that funny. I’ve just gone back to the well too many times. So I’ll leave it alone.
[Dan] So if it’s funny on its own, then being a reference to an earlier thing is just extra icing.
[Howard] It’s just gravy.
[Dan] Okay. Icing and gravy in the same analogy.

[Brandon] Bree, any sort of pitfalls you can think of? What are the problems? People say I want to write my characters quirky. Does that raise any red flags?
[Bree] Sometimes if you get too quirky… definitely, if you take the quirk too far, they become unreliable in a way. Where it’s just… you think the author, they’re just going for the gag, they’re just going for the joke… the thing I can think of in my book is there is a very, very intense scene between my two main characters where normally she does edit out what this guy says all the time because he has a foul mouth. But, in this particular scene, it’s such an emotionally raw scene, that she does not edit him. Because if the reader had read that scene and she had suddenly flipped to something… had suddenly edited him in the middle of this very intense thing he’s conducting to her, I think the reader would have stepped back and said, “Whoa, that doesn’t work for me at all.” They wouldn’t have gotten…
[Howard] It would have knocked you out of the story.
[Brandon] I think you’re exactly right there. That’s the big pitfall I would see is when the story starts becoming about the quirks instead of the characters. Unless you’re writing a really quirky comedy, which… they tend to have various different levels. But when the quirks overshadow the characters, you’ve gone too far. That’s the problem. When people come to me and say, “I want my characters to be more quirky,” that… immediately I worry about that. I worry that… well, are you wanting to write comedy or do you want your characters to be more distinctive or what are you really searching for?
[Howard] Sometimes when people are looking for quirks, I’m… I think what they’re actually looking for is a way to make their writing more humorous without actually writing a comedy. The problem there is that that’s not how it’s done. We don’t laugh at people just because of their quirks. We laugh at people because they have responded to something in a way that’s funny. That’s independent of what’s broken about them.
[Dan] Well, and a quirk… when we say quirk, that makes us think funny, but that is not the only way to use them. A good quirk will inform and create a character rather than just feel tacked on to it. For example, Dexter from the Jeff Lindsay novels. He’s essentially a forensic detective, and his character quirk is he’s also a sociopathic serial killer. That is such an interesting quirk that informs the rest of the story and it creates so many other things. It doesn’t feel just like, “Oh, he’s a forensic detective, but he also, you know, whatever…”

[Brandon] Let’s go ahead and do our book of the week. We’re going to have Bree tell us about her book, which is on audible. You can get the audio version. So, tell us about The Dark Divine.
[Bree] The Dark Divine is about a girl who… growing up, she had a brother and her brother’s best friend, they were the Three Musketeers until one day the friend disappears off the face of the planet. She knows something horrible happened between her brother and a friend, but she doesn’t know what it is. They’ve kind of moved on, until three years later, the best friend suddenly comes back to town. He wants something, and it’s only something Grace can give him. Her brother desperately wants her to stay away from him. So she has to figure out what happened and how she can fix it. She wants to try and fix it, and we’ll see if she can.
[Brandon] Okay. You can go to audiblepodcast.com/excuse. Support the podcast. Support Bree for being nice enough to come by and put up with us. Download a copy of the book and start a 14 day free trial on Amazon. We do have the details on our website where you can see kind of what you’re agreeing to and that sort of thing.
[Howard] 14 de… bladeeblah. 14 day free trial on audible. You said Amazon.
[Brandon] Oh, did I say Amazon?
[Dan] Amazon does not have a 14 day free trial.
[Brandon] No, it doesn’t.
[Howard] No, they don’t.
[Brandon] On audible.
[Howard] podcast.com/excuse.
[Brandon] /excuse.
[Howard] This shill has been brought to you by Howard Tayler who wants to make sure that we represent our sponsors correctly. And now, we return you to this podcast.

[Brandon] Great radio voice. I want to talk a little bit about more character quirks, taking it not the humorous direction. Because when I view character quirks… I realize that word, as Dan said, does sound a little bit humorous. I am looking, when I’m doing that, for ways to break the stereotype. That’s my main goal with character quirks is… how does this character fit into the story? How will people expect this character to fit into the story? How therefore can their life experiences and who they are make them incongruous for those expectations? I’m looking for incongruity. It’s not necessarily… people say I want a quirk. They think, “Okay. I want to write something like pizza delivery man for the mob.” Something like Neal Stephenson has come up with, which is just an incredibly mind blowing quirk that you can say in one sentence. But that’s not generally what I’m looking for. I’m looking for something like… in Way of Kings, when I was looking for a quirk, I wanted to juxtapose. I wanted to put a surgeon into a war and make him be forced to actually hurt people. What does that do to his psychology? I want to do things like that. Make a warlord start to…
[Howard] When you start talking about it in that way, I think it’s better instead of using the word quirk, to talk about character weaknesses, character challenges, character obstacles that are inherent to them.
[Brandon] These are all just different words for the same thing. It’s ways to make the character distinctive.
[Howard] Well, yeah. But what I’m saying is for the new writer, if you think quirk, you think, “Oh, I need to do something weird and funny.” Whereas if you think weakness, you think, “Oh, I’m going to write a surgeon who is forced to be a soldier.”
[Brandon] Yeah, but I don’t think that that’s a weakness.
[Dan] I don’t think it’s so much a weakness as it is a difference. Again, it’s making them different. You… In Way of Kings you have a warrior who is different from every other fantasy warrior because he’s also a trained surgeon. Putting someone… it’s a fish out of water kind of idea. It gives them a different perspective than other characters of that type that we have read before.
[Brandon] That’s what I’m… I think that… if we could get our listeners to focus more on that. Incongruity. Ask yourself… one time… this was Dave Farland, a wonderful writing teacher, a wonderful writer. He… in his class that Dan and I took years ago now, he said, “Ask yourself why this character cannot fulfill the role in the plot that they are expected to fulfill, and that is where you start to find your interesting quirks.” It’s the one armed quarterback. That sort of thing. Where you’re actually trying to build your characters in a way that… ask yourself who would be perfect for this role, and I’m not going to use that person. I’m going to use someone else.
[Dan] I remember him in class talking about that. He specifically said to do auditions. Which I’ve actually done for a couple of books. You take the perfect candidate for that job and throw them out. Then you just think. If I… this warrior. We’re going to get rid of the warrior, and instead we’re going to have a baker. We’re going to have a princess. Or we’re going to have somebody else who does not fit that role as well, and just audition them through and see how it goes.
[Howard] Do we have some good examples from books that everybody will have read? Is there a… like, I’m thinking Lord of the Rings.
[Brandon] Lord of the Rings is a great example because… it’s now become its own cliche. But if you throw away all of the history that came after it, and are looking at it when it was released. Tolkien was a scholar of Beowulf. He loved Beowulf. He did a translation of it. He actually wrote… let’s look at the Hobbit. He wrote The Hobbit and said I want to put someone else in Beowulf’s shoes who would not be the superhero that Beowulf was. The Hobbit came from… if you go back and read Beowulf, there’s this great scene where Beowulf and his people steal from a dragon, and go grab a cup, and all this stuff. Almost the exact same scene ended up in The Hobbit, except it’s Bilbo doing it instead. It’s this…
[Howard] A very staid, straightlaced, homemaker homebody dude…
[Brandon] of a guy.
[Dan] That’s a great example of how a quirky character can work so well, because, as you said, that has become the new cliche because it was so good.
[Brandon] It has. And you’re looking at writers to do something like that without copying. Use the method without exactly what’s going on.
[Bree] Well, I’m thinking Hunger Games. I just finished rereading The Hunger Games today. The heroes of the novel are a baker and a teenage girl who’s described as being… she has skill, but she is very small. The other contestants are extremely large. She’s up against Kato, who’s this huge brutal kind of maniac of a man. Where she describes herself as… she’s a very small girl, and her partner
in it is a baker. He doesn’t want anything to do with fighting with violence. He’d rather bake bread and frost cookies.

[Brandon] Exactly. This is the sort of stuff exactly that we’re looking for. Let’s just throw out some things that they could consider. We’ve talked about profession. Try and find someone who has a different professional background than you would expect them to have in the role that they’re in. What are other different things that they could have?
[Bree] Well, I hate to bring up my book again but…
[Dan] Please bring up your book again.
[Bree] One of the things I wanted to explore was how does someone from a very Christian background deal with discovering the secrets of the underworld. Demons and werewolves and vampires. How does she come from this… from the one background of Christianity and faith and redemption and forgiveness and do unto others and suddenly realize there’s this entire other mythology in the world.
[Howard] Oh, yes, werewolves are real.
[Brandon] That’s a great thing. Religion. You could put someone with a very different religious background in a role that you wouldn’t expect them to be. We’ve mentioned psychology with Dexter, and things like this TV show Monk which kind of almost I think goes too far, makes the story about the quirk. But someone with a psychological profile or way of thinking that does not fit the type of person that they’re meant to be.
[Dan] I think philosophy is an interesting way to go. I mean, I guess this kind of falls under religion, but I read this great essay about Star Wars, talking about how the Jedi’s claim to be pacifists but really they’re warriors. What about that same story with an absolute pacifist in the role? Someone who does not fight and won’t hurt other people as the lead in your action/adventure story?
[Bree] That makes me think of Avatar: The Last Airbender. You have this… he’s one of the Air monks, he’s been taught his entire life, don’t be violent, you can’t kill, and then it comes down to the end, and they said…
[Brandon] Hey, hey, hey! Don’t… spoilers. Don’t spoil. No spoilers
[Dan] We won’t spoil the end, but I will agree that that was an incredible end to his series because of that quirk. Yes. That’s an excellent one to bring up.
[Bree] Okay. I’m not going to spoil. But he is required to kill someone. He is told that he has to kill someone.

[Brandon] All right. I’m going to force Howard to give us our writing prompt this week.
[Howard] Okay. I’m going to ponder this for just long enough to determine that the quirk for your writing prompt is a physical attribute that in some way influences this character’s religion.
[Brandon] Okay. They have some sort of physical attribute that makes up their religion, influences their religion. That’s a great one! This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.