Guess Who?

During a recent visit with my sister and her two daughters, I was reminded about the importance of good characterization.

“Play ‘Guess Who’ with us, Aunt Diane!” my niece Emily insisted, giving me her best smile.

“Yeah!” seconded Ellie.

How could I say ‘no’ to two such adorable faces? “Sure!”

The four of us spent the afternoon taking turns playing countless rounds “Guess Who?” In this game, two opponents are each given a board containing headshot type cartoon pictures of a dozen or so people, all with different hairstyles, hair colors, clothing, and accessories. One player selects a particular character to be their “Guess Who” that the other player must try to identify. The other player tries to guess who the chosen character is by asking objective, factual questions like: Is your character wearing a hat? Is your character smiling? Does your character have brown hair? By process of elimination, the guesser attempts to identify which character is the “Guess Who?”

After no less than a hundred rounds of the game, my nieces eventually grew bored and ran off to watch Dora the Explorer. My sister and I, now comatose from the tedium, couldn’t rouse ourselves from our chairs.

“Let’s play again,” I suggested to my sister. “But let’s ask subjective questions instead.”

She arched a brow. “That could be fun. You’re on.”

She was the first to pick the character and I was the first to guess.

I posed my first question. “Does your character look like the kind of person who would pull her car over to help a stray dog?”

She nodded.

I eliminated the characters who weren’t smiling.

“Does your character look like she’d sleep with her boss to get ahead at her job?”

“Yep,” Susan said.

That eliminated the woman wearing the blouse buttoned up to her throat and the one with the outdated beehive hairdo and cat-eye glasses. But a half dozen potential loosey-goosey dog lovers still remained on the board.

“Does your character look like the type of woman who would get Botox injections?”

She nodded.

I eliminated the woman with the fresh flower in her hair and the one wearing the Bohemian batik blouse. Too natural.

I was down to only four characters now.

“Does your character look like someone who would help you egg your boyfriend’s car if he cheated on you?”

She nodded.

Only one person on the board looked like the kind of person who would meet all of the criteria – the voluptuous redhead wearing a playful grin, a low-cut bright purple blouse, and lots of mascara on her slightly narrowed eyes.

“That’s her!” Susan said, conceding my win.

We were amazed that I’d so easily identified the character. But, unbeknownst to us at the time, we hadn’t just played a silly game, we’d performed an exercise in characterization.

Just as we can tell a lot about people by how they look, how a character in a novel looks says a lot about them, especially the parts of their appearance that the character can control. Readers will have different expectations of a novel’s heroine if she chooses to wear fishnet hose and black leather thigh-high boots than they will if she slips her feet into a pair of cheap flip-flops. Same goes for hair. Is it dyed or natural? Long and loose, or short and stylishly coiffed? Does the heroine have a ready smile for everyone, or is she stingy with her signs of affection? Are her nails perfectly manicured, or chewed to the nub?

As writers, it’s our duty to make sure our characters’ appearances tell our readers something about who our characters are. To see if you’ve done your job, here’s an easy test. Take all of your outward, objective description regarding a character from your manuscript and make a list. Then, give the list to someone who is not familiar with your project. When the person has finished reading over the list, ask them to describe the character in more subjective detail based on the visual descriptions you’ve provided. If the reader nails your character’s personality, you’ve done a good job. If the reader is unable to formulate a clear sense of your character, perhaps more description is needed. If the reader is way off base, some revision may be necessary to make sure the character is developed more clearly.

Need some practice? Play a few rounds of “Guess Who?”