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This is Relevant To My Interests, especially since it sounds like it might parallel a certain scene in a certain unpublished novel.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

[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."