Overquirked!
collateral tales
Recently, I watched the indeed infernal movie adaptation Ghost Rider by Mark Steven Johnson from Marvel’s graphic novel series of the same name, starring a CGI motorbike and Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze. I’m still stunned by how bad it was. And, honest to goodness, I can take a severe beating from a movie as long as Nicolas Cage is among the cast. Now one of the things you wouldn’t want to do to a character in your novel, short story, or screenplay, is what they did to Johnny Blaze: stuff’em to death with quirks and idiosyncrasies. Make ’em Mr. and Ms. Mannerism. Watch the movie and see what I mean. Or, come to think of it, don’t. Imagine a character in funny costumes with a single-minded, peculiar occupation, who keeps his motorbikes in his living room, is a teetotaler, and slurps brightly colored candies from a cocktail glass while watching comedy shows with chimpanzees in it, exclusively. For starters. Oh, and not to forget an eternal bad hair day.
I’ve come across such overkill in mannerisms rather often (though not in major feature films; that’s a new one). Non-standard characters in fan fiction. First takes on science fiction, fantasy, or cyberpunk from inexperienced writers. Roleplaying characters, especially, players and non-players alike. Of course, everyone’s advice is “be specific,” and generic descriptions as “handsome” or “smart” and the like are equally repelling. But what your characters gain in quirks, they quickly lose in depth. And that’s not all. Quirks and idiosyncrasies should have a function. Each. At one end of the spectrum, they’re a handy device to differentiate one character from another. But if you pull out all the stops, nothing is gained with such a quirk inflation with respect to differentiation. At the other end of the spectrum, quirks can hint at important characteristics, i.e., important for the development of the story. (Like, say, in such a way that it lets a character make certain kinds of decisions.) But these have to be meticulously developed and extensively fine-tuned in order to work at the right moment. The more quirks your characters have, the more arbitrary they tend to become, or at least to come across as such because you just don’t have the time and space to make them all feel relevant. And the more arbitrary they are or seem to be, the less useful they become as a scaffolding for developments and decisions in terms of consistency and plausibility. And, almost always, less useful translates into more bumpy almost instantly.
