Have You Tagged Your Characters Lately?

Character tags are the little things that make your characters more distinct. Harry Potter's scar is a character tag. So is Scarlett O'Hara's practice of deciding to think about some troubling matter 'tomorrow.'

A character tag can be something visual, or something the character says, or a mannerism or behavior, or even the reaction of others to that character when he walks into a room--- if everyone says a certain character 'looks creepy', for example.

The best character tags are ones that tell you a little more about the character. Harry Potter's scar tells about his tragic past, and his current unwilling connection to Lord Voldemort. Scarlett O'Hara's thinking about things 'tomorrow' shows something about her personality.

Other character tags are less revealing, but they help the reader to tell one character from another, which in turn makes it possible for the reader to build up a mental picture of the character.

Main characters have many things about them that serve as character tags. Since the main character is onstage all the time or nearly so in much fiction, there may be less need of the character tag for the purpose of telling that character apart from others. But to mention each character tag a couple of times helps build the reader's understanding of the character.

Secondary characters may be harder for the reader to tell apart from one another. They should have a few strong character tags that you use for them. If the character is onstage most of the time--- as in the main character's sidekick--- your use of character tags may be similar to the way you do it for main characters. If the secondary character is only intermittently present, you might need to use a character tag on each reintroduction. At least during the first half of the book.

Minor characters--- as in, characters even less prominent than the secondary ones--- are not deeply developed. They may be nothing more than a name, a function in the story, and a character tag or two.

Using a character tag can seem a bit repetitious. But as the character tag is a learning tool to help your reader learn the things he must know to enjoy the story, a little repetition is a good thing and can seem invisible to the reader if not overdone. And you can use your writer's creativity to find ways to use the same character tag in different ways when needed.

Race and Physical Characteristics in Tagging

Race and other physical characteristics can be used as a character tag, and they must be to ensure that your reader is aware of these things. Many readers skim-read and may not notice a first mention of such things. I did that with a book once only to find in the last 1/4 of the book the character I had been following throughout the book was a Black man and that this fact, at that point, was causing him a problem.

In the English-speaking world, the reader will tend to assume that a character is of the Caucasian race, of normal height rather than being a dwarf or a giant, not missing limbs or wheelchair-bound and without massive scarring, mutilations or deformities unless you, as a writer, mention that difference.

In the case of Black characters, race is such an explosive issue that many non-Black authors fear to mention the race of their Black characters at all, or mention it briefly, once, with a shudder, and then go on to write safer things. Worse, they may try to be subtle and say the Black character likes jazz, reads a book by Alice Walker, or have him use slang expressions derived from hip-hop culture, and assume he's told the reader the race of that character. This 'subtlety' limits your ability to develop Black characters beyond the stereotype, and it doesn't reveal the information you want revealed. That hip-hop slang can also be used by a 65-year-old Japanese-American news stand owner, and the Russian mafia boss is likely to be a jazz fan as well.

In older books people were franker about Black characters. They would say 'black' right in front of God and everybody, more than once. If Professor Jasper was a Black man, you might see something like this:

"Professor Jasper?"
The black man turned. "What do you want?"
"Could you explain the bit about the theory of relativity again?"
"What part don't you get?"
"All of it."

The main point is, we as writers, if we want to present a diverse world full of Black people and Asians and little people and men with artificial legs need to man up, eschew political correctness, and say what we mean to help our readers make an accurate picture of our characters.

 Twitchy tagging

Some writers, in their character tagging, tend to use nervous tics, hand-wringing, hair-twisting, and the like as tags all too frequently.  They think these devices make their characters more memorable.

But the problem is that tags not only help the reader tell characters apart, they also reveal things about characters. If you have a hand-wringing character and a hair-twisting character and a few more with nervous tics of different sorts, you end up with a twitchy group of characters, to the extent that your character group seems highly unrealistic. And in a major character, twitchy tags can be off-putting.

It's best, then, to avoid these types of tags unless you have a character whose personality is really expressed by them. Also to be avoided are excessively bizarre tags such as a character that starts taking off her clothes every time someone says the word 'and'. Stick with the more conventional tags nearly all of the time to best connect with your readers.

Posts about character tagging

Building Fictional Characters
Tags for Secondary Characters
Character Tags in Fiction
Character Tags: Michael Scott and Mustache Jeff


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