Quick-dry Characters

Quote of the Day: "Don't hold me up now, I can stand my own ground. I don't need your help now, please don't hold me down."
- Rise Against, Prayer of the Refugee

So I talked a little bit in my last post about adding shallow layers of character development that can nonetheless really make a reader grab onto a character quickly, and I want to talk a little more about it today.

It's something I've been noticing as I've read my eight million books this summer, both at work and for my research. Most romance characters tend to be, um, pretty stock. But every once in awhile I catch one who has something different. It can be totally arbitrary, shallow, and unimportant, but it's enough to get me interested and make me interested in the character until he or she develops enough for me to really start caring. Sort of like an appetizer, if you will.

Some examples from work:
A romance heroine who nicknames all the Scotsmen who abduct her when she travels back in time (Yes, you read correctly. Time-travel romance is a hot seller, baby!).
A horror villain that dresses in a trenchcoat and fedora and has no face.

They were just different enough to grab me and keep me reading until I really got hooked on the deeper aspects of the characters in their respective stories--and those things are quick, easy, one-off bits of character development.

But the writers of the Dragonlance series, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, are really the king and queen of this. And what's most key is that they do it with minor characters, so that you're not just loving the main characters, but every once in awhile you get someone totally new and awesome and unexpected, like free ice cream with your meal at a restaurant. Some examples from them:

An irascible wizard who can't remember his own name.
A dirty little dwarf that speaks like a child and falls in love with a different wizard.
A dragon so old his teeth have all fallen out.

The last two of these are minor characters, they only get a few pages and don't have much an impact on the story, but they nonetheless help draw you in and get you excited about what you're reading, and I wouldn't be surprised if they wound up being some people's favorite characters. I call this sort of characterization "quick-dry", because it's fast and simple, but oh so incredible when it's done right.

It's something I'm still struggling to figure out how to work into my own writing. I can see two ways of going about it: one is to add in more one-off characters with cool quirks to them, but that's not something I really want to do, and the other is to add little quirks to my main characters that make them initially intriguing. I've been going through and giving them hobbies, recently, and hoping that I can work those into the story in a cool enough way that they'll grab people.

Not sure how long it will take me to get this working, but I've recognized it as an incredibly powerful tool, so I thought I'd share it.