Standing Out in a Crowd

As a writer, it's your responsibility to distinguish one person populating your story world from another. Giving each character a distinctive trait or quirk is called "tagging" or labeling. Here's some tag types:

Characternyms: These are character names that reflect that character's role or personality in a story. In Peter Abraham's A PERFECT CRIME, he named one of the lead characters, a man who discovers his wife in the throes of adultery, Roger. This character, screwed over in the literal and figurative sense of the word, makes for wonderful symbolic characterization the reader can sink into when they're grasping for a foothold in a new story. Even "Jolly Roger," the sarcastic nickname by which another character refers to him on page five, begins to carve out the nature of his character. Remember to avoid using names that start with the same letter.

Recurring Speech Patterns: In addition to regional accents or speech impediments, you can utilize jargon related to the character's occupation or education level to make characters distinctive. Maybe your heroine's mother drops Italian like F-bombs in her speech. Have you ever known anyone who used malaprops--the wrong words--when trying to make a point? In THE CHERRY ORCHARD, the Russian playwright Chekhov created an old man named Gaev who would call out billiard shots in the midst of his speeches. Not only did this set him apart from the other characters, it carved out part of Gaev's backstory as a part of the lower-class society who gambled at billiards to make ends meet.

Recurring Action: Visual techniques also help the reader identify characters. What about a character that stumbles over everything or bites his fingernails (please, not the hero!). In BUILDING BELIEVABLE CHARACTERS, Marc McCutcheon compiled a fantastic list of personality/identity traits, including characters who: pick fights, forget their train of thought, shout at the TV, wear too much cologne, litter, fall asleep in his clothes, etc. Consider carefully what the action implies, as comedic tags may undercut the core of the character you wish to get across to the reader.

Clothing: A character who wears his military outfit long after his service years are over conveys something entirely different than someone who wears a black Sex Pistols shirt. Klinger wore a dress in M*A*S*H that spoke to his motivation. Carrie Bradshaw had Milono Blahniks. Sometimes even the smallest articles can divulge just the right amount of character.

Need more ideas? In your writer's journal, keep an ongoing list of observed behaviors or snippets of interesting slang or dialect. For clothing, keep an eye out for magazine or clothing sales ads featuring unique or eye catching outfits to store in a clip file.

What's the most ingenious way you've used to distinguish a character?