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This is Relevant To My Interests, especially since it sounds like it might parallel a certain scene in a certain unpublished novel.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

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. ;-)