Guest Blog: Your Character is Not an Adjective

By the latest Wave-inatrix cupcake favorite, Tony Robenalt, bon vivant and Script Department reader. And Wavers, I think this guest blog is particularly helpful to us all as writers. Read on and enjoy:

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You know that crazy dude who lives a few blocks away from you? The one whose front yard is a dense, tangle of weeds and overgrown shrubs, and whose kitchen (rumor has it) is a maze of stacked newspapers, some with dates from the last century? Yeah, that guy. You know whom I’m talking about. You said “Hi” to him one fine morning while you were out walking your dog and he was in his driveway, kneeling down to pick up what would presumably become one more brick in his periodical funhouse, and instead of returning your greeting, he snatched up the paper and ran back into his house. That guy. The crazy dude. The one your next door neighbor claims she once found curled up in the fetal position on her front porch, bawling his eyes out, wearing nothing but a tattered pink bathrobe.

What you probably don’t know about that guy is that his wife passed away eight years ago. He can’t throw away the newspapers, because each one reminds him of a specific day when he sat in his kitchen, sipping coffee from a chipped, faded yellow mug with “World’s Greatest Woman” on it, and read the A-section out loud to the empty chair across the table from him, imagining his loved one’s reaction to the various articles.

Now how would you describe that guy? I casually tossed out “crazy” in the first paragraph, but that doesn’t really do him justice, does it? How about eccentric? Grief-ridden? Or, ugh, heaven help us, sad? Meh. None of those adjectives replaces the visual of his neglected front yard (his wife did all the gardening and yard work) or of newspapers stacked from floor to ceiling in his kitchen (and probably living room and dining room as well; eight years is a lot of newspapers). No adjective could possibly live up to the image of him sitting at his kitchen table, drinking coffee from his wife’s mug, reading the newspaper to someone who isn’t there, or crying on your neighbor’s porch the morning after a bender, clad only in his wife’s bathrobe. And how about his reaction when you said “Hi” to him? Yowsers.

Which brings me to the point of my first (and hopefully not last) guest entry in Julie’s magnificent blog:

A very sagacious (uh-oh!) professor of mine at USC once gave me this advice about creating memorable characters: “Don’t think of your characters solely in terms of adjectives. You should start there, sure, but you need to move way beyond that. Think of them in terms of verbs. Not what they are, but what they do. Don’t get stuck on the abstracts. Think visually. This is the best way to overcome the dreaded ‘He sits. He stares. He smiles. He nods. He rolls his eyes.’ syndrome.”

I think it’s fantastic advice, and has done more to help me create characters that jump off the page and resemble actual human-like people than any of the other various gimmicks and tricks I’ve attempted. So the next time you’re doing character bios/sketches, and you’ve got a protag named John who is painfully shy, try writing something like: “John avoids eye contact with pretty women; John raises his hand when he’s in a group and wants to say something—like he’s still in school; if John enters a room full of strangers (e.g., at a party), he always makes a beeline for the window—as long as no one is standing near it—and spends a lot of time looking outside, trying to pump himself up to talk to people. Etc.” You might find, much to your amazement, that poor, shy John takes on a life of his own. A life beyond “shy.”


Tony Robenalt, USC film school grad, pool hustler, degenerate gambler, and all-around fly in the quantum soup, has written eleven scripts, each more brilliant than the last, and digs those multi-colored sugar stars the Wave-inatrix puts on her cupcakes. When he's not causing the Universe to cry out for its waiter, he's reading your scripts.

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