Got back to the daily frenzy yesterday. Going from vacation straight to house guests is enough to give you whiplash, even (or especially?) when the house guests are family…
But part of the daily frenzy is the weekly blog post, so here I am. A couple of weeks ago, somebody asked about character description – tips and tricks and so on. So that’s today’s topic.
The very first decision a writer makes – usually subconsciously – regarding describing their characters has to do with what, exactly, that writer wants to accomplish with that description. Are they trying to paint a clear, visual word-picture of a particular person, or are they trying to get a particular emotional reaction from readers? Do they want to point the reader in a particular direction (misleading or not)? Is the most important thing they want to get across about this character their position in society or their position in the story? Their ethnicity and cultural background? Their similarities to other characters, or their differences? Their similarities to the presumed reader, or their differences?
What a writer can accomplish with a character description is strongly influenced by the viewpoint type and the viewpoint character they’re using in a particular story. In first-person and tight-third-person, any description tells as much about the POV character as it does about the character who is being described. If George, the painter, is the viewpoint character, he may go into detail about the colors of the newcomer’s clothing, hair, and eyes; if Janet, the personal trainer, is the viewpoint character, she’s far more likely to notice the newcomer’s weight and level of physical fitness/muscle tone. Morgan, who has been established as unobservant, probably will only notice the character’s most unusual or atypical features – he’ll refer to “the guy in the pink tutu” and leave out everything else.
A POV character’s personal reaction to a new character will color their description as well – if they find the character attractive or repellent, it will color the word choices they make when describing someone. Consider the difference between saying someone has chocolate-colored eyes, mud-colored eyes, or brown eyes. When the writer isn’t filtering descriptions closely through the mind of a POV character, as is usually the case in omniscient viewpoint, they can use word choice to predispose readers to judge a character in certain ways. How many villains have ever been described as having “warm brown eyes”?
The language one uses for description is part style and part emotion. If you want to take a mechanical approach, list all the visual aspects of a person: height, hair color, eye color, build, etc. Then list basic adjectives that go with each: tall/short/average; blonde/brunette/redhead; blue/brown/hazel/black. Then list a bunch of synonyms and adjectives that mean the same thing (as above, where eyes are chocolate, mud-colored, brown). Finally, look at the emotional connotations of the phrases – whether they’re appealing, neutral, or repellent – and pick the one(s) that fit the way you feel (or want your readers to feel) about that particular character.
There are several common approaches to character description, including:
- Keep it to a minimum, or leave it out entirely. This is often advocated by writers who want readers to use their imaginations, or who want readers to be able to choose a character to identify with. Some writers deliberately limit their character descriptions to hair color, eye color, and height. Some don’t even provide that much. There’s a possibly-apocryphal story about Isaac Asimov being taken to task at a convention by an editor for not describing his main (female) character. Asimov went out in the hall and found four women who’d read the story. Each of them had no trouble describing the main character in detail; each described someone who looked a lot like themselves.
- Stick strictly to details that affect the plot and/or characterization. If your character has naturally green hair, but his/her hair color has no influence on plot or the character him/herself, don’t mention it. If the character has average-brown hair and this plays into their self-image as a boringly average person, by all means bring it up.
- Give the reader any striking or unusual details about the character, as well as the plot-important ones. It may not matter to the plot that the character has green hair, but it’s unusual, so mention it right along with their seven-foot height that will allow them to grab the McGuffin at the critical moment in the story.
- Give as much information about the character as you can, preferably as soon as they show up (as long as it doesn’t slow down the pace). This is the lump-of-description technique, where the writer spends as much as two or three pages detailing each character’s physical attributes. It has fallen out of favor as a technique, but it can be extremely useful if your POV character is highly observant or a Sherlock Holmes type who draws conclusions about everyone he/she sees.
- Work descriptive details into the story as it moves along, instead of lumping them into a descriptive sentence/paragraph/page(s) when they first appear. This is especially useful when the new character appears in the middle of an action scene, where pausing for more than a quick flash of black hair as the newcomer makes an acrobatic flip and disarms two bad guys will slow things down unacceptably.
In actuality, most writers use all these techniques at different times for different characters. It’s common to leave out description of the spear-carriers and walk-ons – the barista, the grocery store clerk, the city guard who lets the hero into the palace, the waiter, the postal carrier. It’s equally common to throw in a couple of striking details like the barista’s full sleeve tattoo, the clerk’s pink-and-purple dyed hair, or the guard’s eye patch to make a particular moment more memorable. This can also serve as camouflage for the scene when the villain disguises him/herself as the postal carrier in order to kidnap the Senator’s son; if the writer has “marked” one or two other minor characters with distinctive details, it won’t be quite such a red “remember this guy! He’s going to be important later, even though I want you to overlook him right now!” flag if the postal carrier wears a butterfly earring or has a bad limp.
I like the part about the emotional connotations of descriptive phrases. I once had a villainous character with pale coloring; I originally described him as having “ivory skin”, but ended up changing it to “whey-pale skin” after realizing that I needed something more unpleasant-sounding.
If you’re going to provide description of any character—protagonist, antagonist, or otherwise—do so immediately upon their presentation in the story. There are few things as disconcerting to a reader as being told how so-and-so looks *after* they’ve formed their own mental image.
Hear, hear! I still remember reading a children’s fantasy novel some years ago where one of the two POV characters wasn’t described until close to the end of the book. He turned out to be rather younger than I thought he was.
In some ways I agree, but there are a lot of circumstances where that doesn’t work.
* It can kill an action scene, as mentioned above.
* If the character’s first encountered in a dark room/alley/forest/etc, it would throw me out of the story to have the kind of detailed physical description that requires being able to see them well. If a description is needed/wanted, it’s going to have to be added later.
* Ditto cloaked/bundled in winter-heavy clothing/covered in mud/etc
There’s also the possibility that people will read the description and then ignore it if it’s not important (remembering a debate over the hair color of the mc in the Twilight books. It is mentioned, but a lot of the debaters remembered it differently….)
I believe I was the one who asked for this post, so thank you.
Something I’d like to do, or do more of, is write complete physical descriptions as background material. This would be “iceberg” work not shown to the reader, but that I could draw on. More than that, I’d like a complete-description system to make doing this easier. (Maybe I should look at tabletop role-playing game aides to try to find this.)
I figure that after I have a complete description in hand, I can tap it as needed for the stuff shown to the reader.
Perhaps the main thing I want to do with character descriptions is to help the reader remember who the character is. I figure a well-tagged character will be better remembered than one who is generic-described, and physical description is a big part of the tagging. This also means that I give priority to (or limit myself to) the significant or striking features that would get noted as part of a first impression.
My POV characters tend to notice things like how another character moves and where they likely keep their weapons. This historically has not worked well for my critiquers.
Getting a POV character to describe him/herself remains a challenge.
A trick I just used for that in my WIP is to have the POV character notice a non-POV character looking at her, and thinking about what the non-POV character would be seeing.
That’s not a bad one, and come to think of it I did something similar in my first novel. But it’s still dependent on the character being somewhat appearance-conscious; if she’s not the sort to spend thinking-time on what she looks like, it’s d@mned hard to get her to think about it for the reader’s sake.
Still, a good tip; I’ll file it for future reference.
Whatever you do, don’t have them take measure of their appearance by looking into a mirror. That amateurish ploy thankfully went out of fashion untold decades ago, but it still pops up now and again in modern fiction.
I think you can get away with having the POV character look into a mirror if there’s some purpose to it other than just an excuse to describe the character for the readers. It might be characterization or world-building. Or you might get away by being audacious about it:
The Matron pulled the now-nude Suzanne in front of a full length mirror. “Describe yourself,” came the command. “Practice describing yourself. When they put you on the auction block, you will need to sound both confident and honest.”
Suzanne watched the image in the mirror take a deep breath. She began to speak…
I had a character describe himself sort of accidentally, by noticing and comparing the traits his sister shared with him vs his half brother.
ex. “Where she was gangly and pale like me, he was fit and bronzed as a soap opera star.”
Mostly my POV characters don’t describe themselves; I’m not sure whether it’s important.
A trick I tend to use for getting the POV’s hair color/style across is having them do something with it. I just used the sentence below in the story I’m currently working on:
“He made sure that his blond curls were still securely tied at the nape of his neck; they had a tendency to escape from the ribbon, especially when he was agitated.”
I tend to fall into the minimalist category. I don’t think Terry Pratchett ever mentioned what his character Sam Vimes looked like. Yet I had a clear mental image of him. Maybe, I just don’t like being told what to imagine.
I’ve had other authors comment that I need clearer character description, because they want to know exactly what everyone looks like. That feels more like a preference. I personally don’t give a sh!t about a character having “striking blue eyes”. Does iris pigment imply moral virtue? Unless there’s a romantic interest, or the color is bizarre, I doubt anyone really notices that sort of thing.
So I tend to give three interesting impressions for each new character (heavily influenced by the character’s POV) and then I keep the scene moving. No reason to slow things down, especially early on in the story.