The Character Tag – Do We Know Who’s Who? By Jackie Blain
Let’s welcome back monthly columnist Jackie Blain as she shares with us about “The Character Tag – Do We Know Who’s Who?.” Enjoy!
One of my screenwriting students came in one night with the first draft of his ensemble comedy. Now, those things – ensemble pieces – are notoriously hard to write whether you’re writing a script or a novel because there are so many characters you have to service. I always think of it like those plate spinners on the old Ed Sullivan show, the ones that put a plate on the top of a bendy stick, give it a spin, and then try to get 10 more plates spinning at the same time. A crash is always imminent!
Of course, that’s part of the fun… for the viewer.
For a writer, however, not so much because the real challenge is making each character different enough from the start so that the reader doesn’t go, “Hmmm, Charles? Who’s that again? I better go back to the beginning….”
Which is the equivalent of all those plates crashing at once.
That was what happened with my student. Their eight characters – Chris and Steve and Mark and James and Brittany and Jessica and Emily and Jennifer – all sitting around a bar talking (and talking alike, although that’s a different problem) for five pages! Sure, the writer put the character names in, but none of us in the class could tell them apart. It was all bon mots and beer, and a lot of furrowed brows.
The poor writer had to spend 10 minutes giving us each person’s backstory when we turned on him. Not fun. Not for any of us.
I finally took pity on him and put the class through this exercise to create character tags – one phrase or sentence that you can use to introduce the character and then do variations of throughout the piece as a sort of shorthand reminder.
Sounds complicated, but it isn’t. Here’s what you do.
- First, do a 5 minute freewrite about your character. Anything you want. Physical description, emotional makeup, intelligence, backstory… whatever is important. Just something to get the character firmly in your mind.
- Next, write down three words (or 2-3 word phrases) that describe your character externally. If he has a limp, write that down. If she has pigtails, note that. Gandalf had a pointy hat. Aragorn’s clothes always looked like he needed to go to the laundry.
- Now write down three words (or 2-3 word phrases) that describe your character internally. If she’s stronger than she looks, or he’s a coward in wolf’s clothing, write that down. Indiana Jones was famously afraid of snakes. Will Hunting was a math genius.
- Now, use those six things to craft a one phrase or one sentence description of the character. It may be primarily physical, or primarily internal. It doesn’t matter. And it may take some work – actually, it always takes some work – but you’ll get your ah-ha moment before long.
Here are a couple of examples of character tags.
- In Scott Frank’s script Out of Sight, a prison guard is introduced like this: “PUPKO, dumb as dirt.” Now, I don’t know about you, but I can already see this guy. And this is a minor character – don’t forget about them!
- How about this one: “Jeff was a classic red head, inside and out.”
- Or: “Jennifer nursed her beer in silence, the way she did pretty much everything in her life.”
Not only are those things interesting reveals about each character at the outset, they help us as writers define how the character speaks and acts from that point forward. In that beer-drinking scene my student wrote, Jennifer pretty much stopped talking. We would see her bury her face in the beer glass, and another character got frustrated at one point and asked, “Do you even know how to talk, Miss Pathetic?”
Again, this might take a bit of work – we might not know our characters as well as we want and this forces us to dig deeper. But, as engineer Fred Kwan says in Galaxy Quest, “It’s the little things in life that make you happy.” Good character tags will make your reader happy, and that’s something every writer wishes for.
Do you have a character that needs tagging?
Post your short character tag in the comments below.
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Jackie Blain is a writer, screenwriter, writing teacher and member of the Writers Guild of America who works with dedicated screenwriters and filmmakers to make their work the best it can be… and remember that they got into this writing thing because of passion and fun. She lives in Brooklyn NY with two cats who, she suspects, hate the heat and wish they were still in Oregon. More about Jackie Blain’s courses, consultations, and evaluation services for screenwriters and filmmakers here.
