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This is Relevant To My Interests, especially since it sounds like it might parallel a certain scene in a certain unpublished novel.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

[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. ;-)