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This is Relevant To My Interests, especially since it sounds like it might parallel a certain scene in a certain unpublished novel.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

[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.