Character Descriptions, Again

[lizvogel]

As a writer, I struggle with physical descriptions of characters. Partly this is because, as a reader, I'm largely oblivious to them; I'm not one of those readers who envisions a movie in her head whilst reading, and what people look like is especially not something I devote mental processing power to. (I have considerable trouble with it in real life, too.) And partly, I don't understand why it matters; surely it's more important how the character behaves than what color eyes they have?

I also struggle with whether it does actually matter that much. My Horrible Ex Writers Group (tm) insisted it did, but I'm not sure that wasn't an excuse on their part to avoid an in-depth discussion of what was lacking in a story, which would have required time and analysis that nobody much wanted to put forth. What's worse, I suspect the real answer is that it depends on the reader. I've never had a satisfactory conversation with someone advocating for the other side on this matter; I would dearly love to get inside such a person's brain and figure out why knowing what a character looks like is important to them. If I understood it, I think I could either do a better job of catering to it, or perhaps find something else that would satisfy the same need without contorting my own poor brain.

So of course it pleased me to run across this in a recent Jenny Crusie post:

For example, when I was writing Maybe This Time, I didn’t spend much time on Andie or North because what they looked like didn’t matter. What mattered were the details they noticed seeing each other for the first time after ten years, how they’d changed and how they hadn’t, how that hit them. I don’t remember what Andie looked like except that she had her hair pulled back and North didn’t like it; I remember that North looked tired and that made Andie catch a little.

This is Relevant To My Interests, especially since it sounds like it might parallel a certain scene in a certain unpublished novel. I think the housemate has that one; I shall have to see if I can find it.

Comments

[legionseagle]

I'm almost tempted to enquire whether we were in the same Horrible Ex-Writers Group, since they did exactly that (though perhaps there's a manual for running a critique group, badly.) And then when I did put in details about appearance (such as the fact that my heroine wasn't wearing any underwear under her riding habit, because it was an important characterisation detail both for her and the chap who realised this important detail only after she'd got soaked through trying to rescue someone who'd fallen off his horse into a flooded ditch they whinged that not wearing underwear was a very out of period thing for a Victorian lady to do, and had I thought through the implications and wasn't the anachronism going to throw readers out of the story? Honestly, for a bunch who parrotted "Show, don't Tell" at every opportunity, they hated being shown stuff without an explanation.

[lizvogel]

Sounds like a different horrible group; sadly, they are not an endangered species. ;-< Mine rarely managed even that level of analysis; mostly they just said "It's fine" even when it was really, really not, because that way they didn't have to think. (If I never hear that phrase in feedback again, it'll be too soon.)

Although mine, too, managed a certain amount of "You showed us something and didn't explain it, so that must be a thing you didn't realize and let us tell you why you're wrong." I'm particularly reminded of the lectures about how translating mathematical papers requires a graduate-level grounding in mathematics as well as languages -- I couldn't possibly have put that in there to indicate the character had a maths degree as well as language skills, oh no.

There are reasons why, much as I would like more critiquers, I am very leery of approaching people for it.

[lizvogel]

Addendum: The lack of underwear clearly is a characterization thing, because it's something the character chooses, not something the character is due to random genetics. That she would make that choice tells you something about her priorities and perhaps intentions, and if it is an unusual thing for a Victorian lady to do (IANA period costume expert), that tells you all the more.

When I'm talking physical description, I mean things like hair color, eye color, height, and so forth. Things that tell you absolutely nothing about who the character is or how they behave (except perhaps to the extent that they haven't chosen to dye their hair purple, or whatever). That's the sort of thing I struggle with, because it does not matter in any possible way that I can perceive. And yet, some readers insist they need to know it.

It's doubly frustrating when I'm dealing with a POV character who isn't much concerned with appearances, her own or others. Trying to get across hair color & style for a character whose only interest in her hair is that it stays out of her eyes -- argh. Trying to convey the police-blotter stats on her husband who she's seeing for the first time in two years (in the middle of a crisis, when she has other things to worry about, and she's known the man for two decades and really doesn't think about him in terms of the specs on his drivers license anyway) was a exercise in forehead-to-wall-application -- hence my appreciation of the Crusie quote above.

[legionseagle]

There were two women in the mid- to late Victorian era who were notorious for not wearing underwear under their riding habits (because the habits were cut so tight they had to be sewn into them) and one of them was notorious courtesan Skittles, and the other was the Empress of Austria. So too right it was characterisation. But also, even pov characters who care about their appearance are going to care about how their appearance differs compared to their own baseline, not how it appears in general.

[lizvogel]

LOL - and quite a character, at that, it sounds like!

True about the baseline. I might (and often do) think "I need a haircut"; I am unlikely to think "My hair, which used to be brown with coppery hightlights but is now silvered to a bronzey steel color, is in need of a trim."

[duskpeterson]

I'm largely with you on this, though I've been educated that it *does* make a difference if the character has a marginalized appearance (different skin color, body size, etc.), because many readers will automatically envision a character as non-marginalized unless they receive periodic textual nudges to remind them otherwise. But if one only describes the marginalized characters, there's a problem. So I try to be balanced.

[lizvogel]

The question of marginalized characters is a political issue I'd prefer to avoid here (although I have read an author who carefully described everyone but the white characters, and yes, it rang very oddly).

But I suppose even that is an aspect of what I'm talking about: If I don't notice or care what characters look like, then I don't notice or care if they look like me or not. And if someone does, assuming it's not a deliberately politicized interrogation of the text, that implies a level of investment in the character's physical appearance that I Just. Don't. Get.

[duskpeterson]

"The question of marginalized characters is a political issue"

Can I just say, on behalf of my SFF characters, that they would giggle hysterically at the notion that they're political issues solely by virtue of not falling within US statistical norms? I'm sure that's not how you meant it, but the wording of your comment did read a bit oddly to me. :)

Taking this back to the writer's point of view (because I certainly don't want to police how readers approach stories): I suppose whether the mention of character appearance is out of place depends on who the POV character is, what his reason is for noticing appearances, and what the author is trying to achieve.

Personally, I'm fond of Chekhov's Gun: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun. I don't mention something in a story unless it's of importance. If it is of importance, then I want to ensure the reader has the opportunity to notice what I've included.

Example: I have a character who lives in an area where there are people of differing skin colors. When he's in his own territory, he tends not to think about skin color, unless someone (usually an outsider) raises the topic.

But when he ends up in an unknown location, he uses the appearance of people to try to identify where he is. And much later, when he's among people who are dark-skinned like he is, and they're on the run, he notices their skin color because he's trying to assess whether they'll all be noticed in the area they're travelling to (where the inhabitants tend to be darker-skinned). All this is sheer characterization and plotting; I think leaving such thoughts out would be odd, in the same way that it would be odd to write a contemporary story about a white person moving to a black neighborhood and not being aware of the skin color of themselves and the people around them. (I've been that person, and though I liked the neighborhood, I was very much aware of being the only white person on the block.)

As the writer, do I want the reader to notice that my protagonist is a darker skinned person of mixed ethnicity? Not if it gives the reader the impression that skin color is of the same importance in his world as it is in the US; that's why there aren't any long speeches by characters in my series over issues of skin color. But skin color does, to a certain extent, indicate national origins in this series, and the entire series is set around clashes between nations. So skin color is one of the many ways in which I tag a person's national origins.

A reader like you, who doesn't care what the characters look like, might get a bit confused in passages where the only indicator that the protagonist has of another character's nationality is their skin color. That might be considered to be a disadvantage to the reader, but no more so than being a reader of romances who prefers to skip over the sex scenes (*points at self*). Every reader has their own reading style, so I try to supply multiple ways to convey important information to readers.

[lizvogel]

I'm sure that's not how you meant it,

Indeed not; if anything, your characters' view should be more the standard (if I'm tracking your world-building correctly). But that is not the world we live in, though they may.

But when he ends up in an unknown location, he uses the appearance of people to try to identify where he is.

Which only makes sense. "Most of the people around here look like X; that means we must have crossed the border into Southland" or whatever. It's setting/world-building, same as describing the forests or the kind of crops planted or the architecture.

A reader like you, who doesn't care what the characters look like, might get a bit confused in passages where the only indicator that the protagonist has of another character's nationality is their skin color.

Actually, no; I'm fine with it when it means something. If you've previously told me that black hair and bronze skin indicates a certain nationality, and the protagonist can expect help/hindrance/apathy from the people of that nation, and then later he runs into someone with black hair and bronze skin... well, okay, I might or might not remember the details, depending on how long ago it was mentioned and what else has happened since, but I'll at least recognize that it means something, and be alert for narrative clues that serve as reminders.

It's when the character's looks are completely irrelevant to their personality or the world-building that it becomes nonexistent data to me. The example I like to use is Barbara Hambly's Time of the Dark; I love that series, and I've probably read it a dozen times. I remember what Ingold Inglorion looks like (scruffy white beard, long brown robe, etc.) because it's so very much the stereotypical vagabond wizard, and he's so very much... not, except when he is. And the author plays back and forth with that trope a lot, so it matters. But the other two main characters? The only reason I can tell you what color hair Gil and Rudy have is because I've looked it up so many times to use in discussions like this; left to my own readerly devices, I couldn't tell you if Gil's hair is brown or black or blonde to save my life. Because it has absolutely nothing to do with how good she is with a sword, or how poorly she gets along with her mother, or how she looks at the city's waste management systems and figures they're in for a cholera epidemic if somebody doesn't do something about the overcrowding soon. I can back-fill that Rudy's probably Hispanic-looking because he thinks a lot about his family and his sisters all have Spanish-sounding names and they're from southern California, but it's entirely logicked out after the fact, not something I ever picked up directly from reading. And the thing is, Hambly's really good with descriptions; she has an almost bardic trick of repeatedly working physical characteristics into the text. And I still miss it.

[duskpeterson]

Ah, if we're talking about breaking the rule of Chekhov's Gun and including information that doesn't play any role in the story (whether it's character appearance or anything else), then that drives me up the wall as a reader. I keep waiting for the moment when the shoe will drop and the writer will reveal why it's so important that the hero has blond hair. Then his lover says, "Your hair is gorgeous," and I'm like, "What? That's it? I sat through an entire paragraph on the hero's gold locks, just so that his lover could compliment him on it? I want it to be revealed that the blond man committed the murder!"

Okay, maybe I'm not a very good romance reader. :) But I have encountered this problem of extraneous character description mainly in love stories, and I can only conclude that the average romance reader is a very visual creature who wants the textual equivalent of screen caps.

[lizvogel]

Yeah, I think you might be side-stepping a genre convention there. ;-)

I can kind of see it for romance, though. At the very least, if A is busy being attracted to B, it makes sense that A would be noticing what B looks like. And possibly contemplating A's own appearance, as well, in hopes that B is also being attracted. (Though even there, I'd be more likely to write about a character realizing that this is the shirt with the gravy stain on it, than thinking about their own hair color or skin tone.)

I'm trying to remember if I paid any attention to what characters looked like in the last romance I read. But I think that might have been by the author I quoted in the OP, so not much of a test case. ;-)