The Power of a Two-Word Character Thumbnail

Can you describe you characters with only two words?

I ran across this simple question in James Scott Bell’s excellent book Voice: The Secret Power of Great Writing. He suggests identifying a character’s dominant impression in two words—a noun that describes the character’s main vocation or purpose, and an adjective that sums up the character’s unique personality and/or attitude. I see the two words as sort of a thumbnail description of the character.

An example:

I decided the main character in my work-in-progress is an unconventional sleuth, while her sidekick is a sassy maid. Those descriptions are oversimplifications, but they point to something essential in the nature of the characters.

It wasn’t easy to boil each character down to two words, but I found the exercise worth it. Here’s why:

1. Identifying a character’s two-word thumbnail helps me to be consistent. When I come upon those inevitable moments when I’m trying to decide how a character will react in a specific scene, my two-word thumbnail is often useful in determining which option best suits their dominant characteristics. Roxana, my sassy maid, will normally err on the side of stating her mind and speaking when she shouldn’t. Since this is the opposite of my normal tendency, keeping her sassiness in mind helps me maintain her unique character and voice.
2. Searching for a two-word thumbnail for each character pinpointed which characters I don’t yet know well enough. For some characters, such as my heroine and her sidekick, creating a thumbnail was a matter of jotting down possible descriptors and then narrowing them down to the most apt choice. When it came to other characters, however, my descriptors were all over the place. I wasn’t sure whether Curio was a frustrated victim or a reformed rogue. The thumbnail exercise showed me where I need to flesh out back stories more fully in order to determine the primary essence of each character.
3. They are a handy way to differentiate between secondary characters. I am working on a mystery, and several of the suspects are landlords. Assigning them adjectives like domineering, kindly, and secretive gives me a simple way to make sure each landlord remains distinct from the others.
4. It helps my critique partners keep track of who’s who. Since we meet once a month, and it may be months between scenes with a given character, the thumbnail list helps them remember which character is which. It will also help when I am working on character descriptions and synopses.

Are you ready to come up with two-word thumbnails for your characters?  Are they straight-laced lawyers? Bitter sisters? Overconfident suitors?

Give it a try, and you’ll gain a few useful insights about them along the way.