Creating Characters: How to Build Story People Read Online Free PDF Page B

far as to set up interim names designed to keep him reminded of each character’s role and attributes—“Mr. Satan,” “Miss Tease,” “Mrs. Frump,” and so on. And Martha Kay Renfroe (M. K. Wren) reports that the name of her half-Nez Perce series detective character “actually is sort of an accident.”
    “I was choosing my detective’s name and got as far as Conan Flagg, but I wanted to give him a middle name. Joseph came to mind for some unknown reason. Probably I just liked the rhythm of Conan Joseph Flagg. Then it occurred to me that it might beinteresting if the Joseph was in honor of Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce leader. And it was only then that Conan’s physical appearance and life history began to come into sharp focus for me. Call it a ‘tag,’ but his Nez Perce heritage is what gave him a past and even a face.”
    In any event, one way or another, Character acquires a name. Beyond this, what other tags does he need?
    Broken down into categories, ordinarily we speak of tags of appearance, ability, speech, mannerism, and attitude .
    Appearance means that it might be nice if your readers had at least some idea of what each character looks like. Kojak’s lollipop and shaved head are tags. So are Long John Silver’s wooden leg and Adolf Hitler’s mustache. Anarchist Johann Most’s bushy beard provided cartoonists with a tag that labeled radicals up to the present day. “Hulk” and “shrimp” differentiate two men. Any item that strikes a distinctive note will do—a habitual cigar between the teeth, a Fu Manchu mustache, green eyes that seem to glow in the dark, uniquely fine or coarse hair, markedly sloppy or fastidious dress, a missing ear lobe, a drooping eyelid, or whatever. Choose two or three items per major character, probably, since you’re going to have to use each several times in order to keep readers reminded that Character isn’t the albino, or the one with the limp, or the drooler with the false teeth that clatter.
    Here, for example, is a “tiny” grandmother in Dian Curtis Regan’s The Perfect Age, as she reaches up “one small hand to anchor her stylish hat, which perfectly matched her tailored burgundy suit.”
    Note, incidentally, that Regan doesn’t simply say, “Mrs. Jones had small hands.” She brings the tag on in action . . . has the character reach up the hand to anchor the hat.
    Further, the hat itself constitutes a tag, for it’s a “stylish” chapeau, which “perfectly matched her tailored burgundy suit.” The result is an image of a particular kind of grandmother: physically “tiny,” in all likelihood a woman of poise and good taste—a far cry from a frowsy grandmother, or a slatternly grandmother, or a gauche, ill-bred, vulgar grandmother, even though Regan hasn’t said so in so many words.
    Another older woman—this time, from Pat Murphy’s The Falling Woman: “I am an old woman. My hair is gray and brown—the color of the limestone monuments raised by the Mayas one thousand years ago. My face has weathered through the years—the sun has carved wrinkles around the eyes, the wind has carved lines. At age fifty-one, I am a troublesome old woman.”
    A far different woman from the Regan grandmother, right? Here we see not only physical details, but a trait of candor: a character not afraid to report honestly on what she sees in the mirror. Also, she admits her age frankly and recognizes the way her associates often see her—“troublesome.” And in her analogy—“the color of the limestone monuments raised by the Mayas one thousand years ago”—establishes her intelligence and the focus of her interests.
    Or let William Kienzle describe Father Fred Palmer in The Rosary Murders : “[He] was forty-seven years old, going on seventy.”
    Is this a tag of appearance, or manner, or attitude? It doesn’t really matter. Here we see a judgment of one person by another, captured in a phrase. “. . . forty-seven years old, going on seventy” is a