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If you google up the word “tic” you’ll see two major definitions:
- a habitual spasmodic contraction of the muscles, most often in the face.
- an idiosyncratic and habitual feature of a person’s behavior.
Wikipedia focuses entirely on the first. I’m going to talk about the second. In particular, applying the idea of tics to the work of fleshing out a character. Now, this is probably best done in moderation, but when it works out you get some very unique and very memorable results. In honor of a certain franchise re-emerging this week, I could bring up a certain shrunken green Jedi Master and his weird manner of speech — strange it was, yes? But forget it you will not! Identify him readily with it, you will.
Character habits don’t have to be vocal. The Caine Mutiny made a big deal out of Captain Queeg’s compulsive need to constantly swivel a pair of steel balls in his hand when he got nervous, which ends up being visual shorthand to show his degenerating mental state. The silent picture serial villain of yore twirls his mustache as he contemplates evil deeds.
But where comics are concerned, I think it’s mostly (and perhaps ironically, given the silent nature of the medium) in the speech. Sometimes it’s even done with the visuals of the speech, like the way the Endless in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman all have their own styles of font and word balloons, but it can also come through in the clipped, rough statements of a character like Rorshach in Watchmen.
People in real life have all sorts of tics, verbal and otherwise. In fiction I wouldn’t do it for it’s own sake, necessarily, since a lot of time verbal tics serve as filler and fictional conversation is a filtered, heightened thing that doesn’t have room for every “um”, “like”, or “know what I mean?” — except where that might reinforce character. I’m going to use Rosa as an example here. When Rosa asks a question, she often ends it by saying “yeah.” It’s not just, “So, now we bargain?” it’s “So, now we bargain, yeah?”
That’s a tic. And my intent with it was always to reinforce the “wheeler dealer” aspect of her character. After all, one of the first tricks they teach salespeople is that they want to get the customer saying “yes.” I could just as easily have Rosa ending her questions with “no?” but that introduces “no” into the conversation. Counterproductive! But on the other hand, it’s not really a calculated thing on her part — it’s calculated on mine.
Something else would be establishing certain ways characters speak and then trying to hold to that, unless the intent is to show that things are out of sorts. If Frank suddenly started speaking in paragraphs, something’s wrong, and hopefully it’s not because I screwed up and am shoving all those words out of his mouth for no good reason. Way back in Episode 1 I used a subtle exchange between Suzie and the cambot interviewing her to indicate she’s not all that comfortable with big words, and I do my best to keep that consistent. She’s not dumb, so where it pertains to her business she can get more complicated, or she can work things out from context, but she’s no Uncle Chuck in terms of just filling the air with all manner of multisyllabic vernacular and supposition. And even Chuck’s got nothing on some hyper-educated Safe Zone luminary like Iphigenia Langhorne who throws around the verbosity like her doctorate depended on it.
Call ’em mannerisms if you want if calling ’em tics makes you–well–twitchy. Like any utility in the writer’s toolbox, they’re best used carefully, but I find they can be extremely helpful to bring your characters to a consistent life.