Characters of Distinction

We all want to create characters who are memorable. A sure wayto do that is to make a character so distinct that a reader will know him well enough to slip into his skin. If you want to know if you've really nailed a character in a reader's mind, just tryomitting "thought tags". Here's how.

Use particular (and perhaps peculiar) expressions. Everycharacter, like every person, expresses himself in a particularway. I'm not referring to merely keeping in mind the time andplace of your novel. Certainly everyone knows that a stockbrokerdoesn't sound like a farm girl, who doesn't sound like a Viking,etc. But even characters who exist in the same time and placehave their individualities. It's the writer's job to create them,exploit them and imprint them on the reader's brain. Take thislittle test to see what I mean:

Who, in Gone With The Wind, would say the followingabout a woman who has just come into a room.

1. Damn, she was beautiful.

2. Gracious, she was beautiful.

3. Granted, she was beautiful.

4. She was beautiful.

5. Lordy, she was beautiful.

Without any name tags I'm willing to bet that you knew eachand every one of them and didn't mistake Mammy's voice forRhett's. And yet there wasn't a single name attached to any ofthem.

Could you take the tags away in your books? Could you do it inother ways than repeating pet phrases? Try this example on forsize. What if you had a character who refused to sit still. Youmight say: "She was up and down morethan______________."

You wouldn't need to add "so-and-so thought," if youused the endings below. You figure out the kind of character towhom these thoughts belong:

a quilting bee

the stock market on a good day

a gambler's hand up his sleeve

a carousel horse

a mama with a croupy baby

hired gun's forty-five.