Only in fiction

[Mad Monkey]

I don't actually mind the aura/vibes thing. It's basically another way of a character subconsciously knowing when something isn't right, which happens all the time. Now, someone's intuition isn't always correct, but that's another story. A lot of intuition, though, is reading the little clues which are less obvious than the ones here without consciously or rationally processing them, and people do that all the time.

Sure, it happens in real life, but I guess I just hate it when authors give the game away on the very first page. Especially when the viewpoint character is a Sansa-like ingenue and her opposition is someone like Littlefinger. It makes me lose respect for the characters, when they persist in trusting someone who literally stinks of serpentlike evil. Of course, it's not always a bad thing and it can be done well. I just think that, too often, it's just a quick way of establishing that a character is untrustworthy without having to do the work of portraying him as convincingly deceitful. I think there's a TV Trope like that, but I'm honestly not emotionally prepared to face that website right at this hour.

[Mina Martell]

I roll my eyes often now, but I've always wondered if "rolling one's eyes" was more something people did in real life because they saw it in fiction than the other way around. I was pretty baffled as a kid when I first came across that expression in a book.

I think blinking in surprise is actually pretty common. I do it, but now i'm not sure if I do it reflexively or as a concious gesture....oh dear.

Do you blink in response to surprising statements? I blink really easily when someone startles me or shouts in my ear or jumps at me, but I don't think I do when someone tells me something mildly unusual. And I just realized that the converse, "not blinking," is even more of a cliche in fiction. For example, Person X says something surprising. So that the author can show that Person Y is cool and difficult to faze, Y "doesn't even blink." Now I'm going to pay attention to whether I blink the next time I hear something surprising...except I blink a lot anyway...and maybe now it won't work because I'll be conscious of it...my head hurts. We need to set up a whole scientific experiment in which people's blink rates are measured both in a control environment and while hearing a constant playback of statements such as "Your mother's run off to join the circus" and "I'm Batman."

I don't actually mind the aura/vibes thing. It's basically another way of a character subconsciously knowing when something isn't right, which happens all the time. Now, someone's intuition isn't always correct, but that's another story. A lot of intuition, though, is reading the little clues which are less obvious than the ones here without consciously or rationally processing them, and people do that all the time.

I agree that this happens sometimes in real life, but it comes off as really heavy-handed and lazy writing when "somehow, Sansa got a bad vibe from Littlefinger, although she couldn't say why" if Littlefinger has been portrayed as perfectly kind and sincere in all his scenes. Instead of evoking that uneasy and conflicted feeling you get in real life when your conscious mind is at war with your instincts, the writer is just screaming at the top of his lungs, "This dude over here, in case you were too dumb to figure it out, is going to be a villain." Furthermore, it's telling instead of showing. I like it when writers give the readers a bad vibe just by choosing the right dialogue and mannerisms (whether it's "smiles that don't reach the eyes" or, even better, the villain making comments that just feel menacing and slightly off depending on his skill at deceit, and the heroine reacting to them depending on her skill at reading people).

ETA: Or, uh, what Mad Monkey said.

[Liadin]

Back to that smiles study: I think it's important to realize there's a difference between spontaneous vs conscious smiles (which is what the study was looking at), as opposed to being honest vs deceitful. The "genuine" smiles in the study all showed people's faces lighting up, almost laughing. But that doesn't mean that someone whose smile is conscious (or "doesn't reach the eyes") is hiding something and deliberately trying to fake you out, which is often how it's portrayed in fiction (if the "didn't reach his eyes" phrase is used, you can guarantee that the character is hiding something).

If you think about how often you smile, I'll bet a lot of the time you deliberately smile when you see someone you actually like--you just aren't so thrilled to see them that your face breaks out in a grin all on its own. That doesn't mean you're faking it and you actually don't like your friends. The way the phrase gets used, it's not that the character is deliberately choosing to smile for some legitimate reason, it's that the character is feeling the exact opposite but trying to hide it.

(Or am I the only one here who would say that the majority of my non-spontaneous smiles are not out of line with what I'm feeling/thinking at the time?)

[gyrehead]

Just as it says in the title.... what sort of mannerisms, behaviors, etc., do you run across a lot in fiction but never in real life?

I started thinking about this due to the Mistborn topic.... every single character in that book can raise a single eyebrow, and does so frequently. I've never been able to do it, and I can't name anyone amongst my current acquaintances who has this mannerism.

What have you read about that seemed odd?

To be fair though Sanderson can't write third person logically worth squat. Read his WoT crap and it is laughable how much descriptive effort he tries to emulate by Jordan and only makes a stilted awkward immature scene at best. I lost track how many times he fails to figure out the basics of how to incorporate another character's physical description that isn't a laundry list like some horrible pre-teen fan fiction. Though the fact the editors at Tor sat with their thumbs up their butts and didn't make an effort to curb it is rather disturbing.

Sanderson though isn't the only one not to figure out that people don't do a thorough descriptive exam of another character that is known and familiar. Try it sometime. Sit down and talk to someone you know well and tick off every attribute from eye color to nose shape to accent etc. Now compare to when you just normally sit down and talk to someone. Jordan was someone who could obsess over every detail to many readers' fury and dismay. But at least he knew how to incorporate it into a narrative that wasn't the silly childish mess that Sanderson wrote.

I loathe the self descriptive crap. Blake Charlton with his debut indulged in a way that should have editorial nuns with rulers standing by to smack the sin out of him.

Mostly I loathe the falsehoods that writers have their charaters povs employ so the writer can "trick" the reader. Sara Douglass comes to immediate mind but plenty others have done so (Robert Jordan does it to a much lesser degree in keeping povs from revealing certain affiliations at times that really are a bit too contrived, but he was much more deft and plausible than Douglass who has one character's pov flirt with facts as if he is another character -- the plot resting on the confusion of identities -- the implausibility and the actual false contrivance has been used in a couple of creative writing courses at Columbia to show a huge no-no to aspiring writers).

And other than Oprah and epic action movie characters I've never heard people bellow in a rising cadence to stress something; particularly when angry (I declare youuuuuuuuuu OUTLAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHW? what a piece of cheap theatrical crap, Blanchett you are better than that silly revisionist turd)

[Stalker]

Do you people understand the purpose of fiction? It's 'what if' not 'what is'.

It should be about imagining possibilities rather than recreating the mundane. :P

I'm so tired of this faux-realism obsession on forums devoted to works of FICTION.

There has to be a limit to how far one go in assuming the best.

If authors were truly exploring the scenario of 'What if everyone had extreme tics', then that would be one thing and not up for this sort of criticism. But this is not the case, authors do this because they either don't get reality, or because they are attempting to show, rather than tell, but are doing it clumsily, and would probably have been better of just stating the characters emotion.

[VarysTheSpider]

Evidently I shouldn't have called the thread "only in fiction," because really I was looking for stuff that's more common in fiction than in real life. (That explains all the "but I can raise one eyebrow!" responses at least.)

It is fiction though, so it's normally going to be more dramatic than real life and include our behaviors that are more interesting.

A counter-point to this is the lack of things that people do that rarely make it into fiction because they're boring and serve no purpose. Like when you're speaking to someone and suddenly you get a frog in your throat and it comes out sounding retarded, or stopping mid sentence and starting again with a different word order, or when you forget the name of someone and spend 20 seconds umming and arghing (that's another thing, umm'ing) trying to find it in the back of your mind.

[john]

yeah, but i absolutely appreciate it when they put that kind of thing in a book.

[Liadin]

It is fiction though, so it's normally going to be more dramatic than real life and include our behaviors that are more interesting.

None of the mannerisms being discussed in this thread make characters more interesting.

If we were talking about things that make characters more interesting than most real-life people, we'd talk about all the characters who go on quests, are willing to risk their lives for the people/ideals that are important to them, and so on.

[Anthem]

I don't think this is a 'mannerism', but one thing I've noticed in novels is that characters' eyes "twinkle" or "sparkle" to show their amusement etc. I have never, ever seen anyone's eyes emit light that flashes.

[Arthmail]

I don't think this is a 'mannerism', but one thing I've noticed in novels is that characters' eyes "twinkle" or "sparkle" to show their amusement etc. I have never, ever seen anyone's eyes emit light that flashes.

I have, becuase its just a descriptive light. Its not like there is a flashlight behind their eyes pouring forth, but i have seen eyes that sparkle.

But this entire thread is a little silly. I personally don't look away from people's faces when they are talking, and tend to look directly into their eyes and continue to focus on their eyes even when they look away until they look back. I'll only change that if there is more than one person in the conversation. Some people find it disconcerting. But describing that in a book would be pretty boring and senseless. It makes me sound like a creep....

or perhaps i am a creep. I don't mind as long as the author is not repeating what he has done over and over again, like the braid tugging of Jordan. But i don't mind people walking to the window, or fidgeting. Its mostly just filler that helps to break up endless amounts of dialogue.

[Gregor Barksdale]

One author should be mentioned here in addition to Jordan. Daniel Abraham has the most ridiculous set of poses and postures that are almost impossible to imagine. I read his first book so slowly because every paragraph I had to stop and try to imagine what a 'complex pose of agreement that also held a nuance of annoyance' would look like

The whole point of the poses is that it's a language (or whatever you'd call that) specific to this world/culture. This has nothing to do with the current topic.

[MinDonner]

For example, in an English-speaking movie, the secondary French character (or the Belgian detective, for that matter) will speak perfectly constructed English, but is unable to use “thank you” and “Sir.” Instead, he says “merci” and “Monsieur”, even though those basic phrases would be the first thing a foreign language speaker learns.

Yeah, this is a peciliarly backwards way of doing it. It's not that those mannerisms don't exist, however, but they'd only make sense if (say) Poirot was an English detective who'd moved to Belgium but was still speaking English to his English mates, with a dash of Frenchiness thrown in out of habit.

(it took me a long time after leaving Japan to stop saying "...ne?" at the end of sentences, but I can't recall ever finishing a Japanese sentence with "...innit?")

[Red Sun]

Yeah, this is a peciliarly backwards way of doing it. It's not that those mannerisms don't exist, however, but they'd only make sense if (say) Poirot was an English detective who'd moved to Belgium but was still speaking English to his English mates, with a dash of Frenchiness thrown in out of habit.

(it took me a long time after leaving Japan to stop saying "...ne?" at the end of sentences, but I can't recall ever finishing a Japanese sentence with "...innit?")

Yes, I made the experience that it is much more difficult to get ride of the more insignificant, but daily words when you switch from one language to the other. When I lived in France for a year, I went on Christmas break, and I had more problems not to reply with "merci" or "de rien" as reactions to mundane friendliness than to speak entire sentences.

[Liadin]

Yeah, this is a peciliarly backwards way of doing it. It's not that those mannerisms don't exist, however, but they'd only make sense if (say) Poirot was an English detective who'd moved to Belgium but was still speaking English to his English mates, with a dash of Frenchiness thrown in out of habit.

(it took me a long time after leaving Japan to stop saying "...ne?" at the end of sentences, but I can't recall ever finishing a Japanese sentence with "...innit?")

I think there is some truth to it--I always say "okay" no matter what language I'm speaking in, and some reflex responses (like "excuse me") you have to drill into your head and when you change countries it can take awhile to switch over to the new language. That said, I think most of the time it's used just to add foreign color without any regard to how speakers of a second language talk--French-speakers in a book will always refer to a man as monsieur for instance. That's not because "sir" isn't a word you'd learn in your new language, it's because it's a French word that English-speaking readers will recognize.

[Errant Bard]

French-speakers in a book will always refer to a man as monsieur for instance. That's not because "sir" isn't a word you'd learn in your new language, it's because it's a French word that English-speaking readers will recognize.

But it still doesn't make sense :P

Saying "pardon" or "merci", as a conditioned reply is normal. Having a speech pattern, a sentence building structure specific to your language is also normal (kinda like frenchmen would abuse the "of" and build long sentences... I think). Not being actually able to hide one's accent is normal (If an author had to write what I say, every "the" would be written "ze")... But conscious speech like the beginning of an address like "monsieur" instead of "sir", no way in hell, and there isn't even a need to use when you use real speech quirks... except to be ham handed at making that character appear a moron (Poirot or Fleur Delacour, I'm looking at you (and what kind of fucking name is Fleur anyway? Think if you had a character called Flower Granger it would sound cool? (though, thinking about it, it kinda sounds like "power ranger" so it could have something)))

Also, speaking of that, when making a French surname, the prefix "de" is not needed. Seems all the foreign authors think french people are all descendent of nobles. Or maybe they just want to make a fop chracter and being french with some aristocratic vibes fits the bill. Screw you, national stereotypes.

[Alexia]

(Poirot or Fleur Delacour, I'm looking at you (and what kind of fucking name is Fleur anyway? Think if you had a character called Flower Granger it would sound cool? (though, thinking about it, it kinda sounds like "power ranger" so it could have something)))

I have no clue who Fleur Delacour is, but Flor is a woman's name in Spanish and it does mean flower.

Aside from that, I pretty much agree - I have standard exclamations that I use in Spanish, I tend to end sentences with "no" for a question or I say "okay" as matter of course...but no way am I addressing an English-speaker as Señor or a Spanish-speaker as Sir. I especially don't swap out simple things like hello, thank you, good evening, etc, between languages unless I wasn't paying attention.

[williamjm]

except to be ham handed at making that character appear a moron (Poirot or Fleur Delacour, I'm looking at you (and what kind of fucking name is Fleur anyway? Think if you had a character called Flower Granger it would sound cool? (though, thinking about it, it kinda sounds like "power ranger" so it could have something)))

At times I did get the impression that J.K. Rowling had based her idea of how her French characters should speak on the dialogue from 1980s British sitcom Allo Allo rather than on any actual French people.

[Maltaran]

(and what kind of fucking name is Fleur anyway? Think if you had a character called Flower Granger it would sound cool?

No, but Flora Granger would sound like a kindly old granny.

[Liadin]

But it still doesn't make sense :P

Uh-huh, that's why I prefaced that sentence with:

I think most of the time it's used just to add foreign color without any regard to how speakers of a second language talk

While it's not unheard of for speakers of a second language to use certain simple expressions from their native language, the words and phrases "foreign" book characters utter are usually not among them. "Monsieur" shows up in a lot of English texts because English readers will recognize the word, not because an actual Frenchman is likely to use it when talking to real-life English speakers in English.

[Mad Monkey]

At times I did get the impression that J.K. Rowling had based her idea of how her French characters should speak on the dialogue from 1980s British sitcom Allo Allo rather than on any actual French people.

Which is weird because I think she actually speaks French and should have a more sophisticated idea of what French people actually sound like. That would be like an American author having all of her British characters say things like, "Allo allo, top o' tha mornin' to ya, guvna! God save the Queen, pip pip cheerio!" and call everyone, "Chavs" (whatever the Hell that means).

That's not because "sir" isn't a word you'd learn in your new language, it's because it's a French word that English-speaking readers will recognize.

IF you're going to do that, you should make it even more irritating and have the French character say things like, "Zat eez mon favorite pastry, heh heh!!!" said Dr. Jacques de Fromage, before biting into a delicious-looking beret, lightly-glazed with eau de croissant and sprinkling of finely-ground tour-eiffel.

Basically, if your French character sounds like Pepe le Pew, or your black character says things like, "DYNOMITE!!!", or your Hispanic character sounds like Speedy Gonzales, you should probably dial back the absurd caricatures just a tad. Readers aren't morons. If you say that a character is from France, give them the courtesy of trusting them to remember it.