forum What kind of mannerisms do your characters have?

Started January 01, 2018 by Tucker mark

tune

I'm trying to think of what mannerisms my characters would have, but i'm struggling to come up with anything. So for some inspiration, what mannerisms have you given your characters?

Heya. I'm looking for inspiration on this sort of thing too! Mannerisms play a big part in developing a character, and I never really know how to go about it other than little body language quirks. Like posture, or hand gestures while talking etc.

You guys! You can google stuff, here's a nice one I found as an example; https://www.wattpad.com/84533439-a-list-of-500-character-quirks-and-traits-list-1/page/2 - you can do ctrl+f and put in random number(or dice roll for it, google has that!), and see what you get. c:

Since one of my characters has a bit of a self destructive and reserved personality since he keeps things to himself a lot. I would think about how people could easily read this kind of behavior off of him.
Since he's quite reserved, maybe he wears a hoodie or sweater a bit too much and often walks with a certain gait. The kind you see when people literally don't care much about themselves. Or maybe it's that certain look in their eye? If they're quite childish and never really grew up maybe they put on clothing or do stuff in a very abrupt way.

It's all about the characters personality and how they move within their environment because of it.

I tend to go for stuff like fiddling with stuff, fidgeting with clothing, biting nails, etc.

i decided to give my character a body-focused repetitive disorder (skin-picking and hair-pulling) because it's something i suffer from and i haven't seen it before in novels, so some of her nervous mannerisms are tugging at her hair and picking at her skin. if it helps think of some mannerisms you have or you've seen in close friends and family (jittery legs if they can't sit still, prefers to tuck their feet under them when sitting in a chair, makes faces when having an inner dialogue, walks like a penguin on ice, swallows every bite of food down with water).

I never really understood what the difference between personality type and mannerisms. Now I get it.

and please don't confuse mannerism with mental illness !

It could even be speech/posture/social mannerisms - saying "uuuh" a lot between sentences, clearing their throat frequently, saying a word a lot ("look", "alright", "you see"), standing in a certain way (with their feet facing inward, crossing legs), tilting their head when trying hard to understand something…

Basically my rule of thumb for mannerisms is: if, in a group of friends, someone wanted to mimic that person, what would they do to make the others go like "yeah, that's definitely X"?

It would be good to have mannerisms that add to the character design and make sense. Examples would include what other people had said-a nervous character having nervous habits or a thoughtful character pacing to think and can't stop.

Mannerisms can be used, not just to add to the character's personality, but also to show that the character is a person who behaves in a natural, un-robot like way. I add my or my family's weird mannerisms to characters. Example: for some reason my best friend and I would rather sit on the floor leaning against a wall or perfectly good couch or something. It's just roomier. Weird things or habits you do like that are easy to add for the sake of making your character have little quirks.

This may be specific to my universe, but the characters do have magical powers and often use them to fidget and express emotion. Jo, my character with ice powers, will create ice crystals to fiddle with. Jared, my character who uses fire, will set things (like post-its) on fire and watch them burn to distract himself when bored/impatient. You know how some people “talk with their hands”? My winged character, Ben, “talks with his wings” in a sense.

My character chews side of his cheek when ever he's nervous, and I have another character who hums all the time. My character that is a queen has perfect posture, and my really quiet character balls up her fist and squeezes it to the beat of her heart, it helps her clear her head

This thread reminds me that I should invest some time into thinking about what my characters while idling or talking, because it's something I like paying attention to. Most of the ones I have come up with are mostly just "emotes with [insert thing here]", like wings or ears, or maybe using hand gestures while talking.

One of them I'm super curious about is using micropauses when a character talks. Someone pointed them out in my speech when I was talking about something, and ever since I've been wondering if anyone else notices or uses them? In an unrelated incident years later, a person pointed out that my characters used micropauses in dialogue (I hadn't especially tried to put them in there, so it could just be so ingrained in my writing that I just can't remove them anymore) and they didn't like it but also didn't explain why beyond "people don't talk like that." (I guess I'm not a people.)