I agree with this, in terms of writing out every nuance of description to make it easy for your readers. However, I would find it difficult to come up with an emotionally-connected story if I couldn't picture my characters myself. I need to be able to see scenes in my head, and if everybody is just a collection of amorphous blobs, I can't see facial expressions or anything much about them at all. I do need to be able to see my characters, in order to write them.
D1 Life Of @123456789 @123456789 hitched her red dress over her wide ankles. She tumbled down the staircase to greet her thirty-five cats. Reaching for the refrigerator door, she placed the urine sample bottle aside the others, turned to the wall: her chart and graph aside the 'Republican Mothers for the Military' nude calendar. Oh, she had been a centrefold once, but now @123456789 dedicated herself to urine sampling, and the detailing of her cats' lives through the electronic journal and blog.
@matwoolf , End Of Days @matwoolf hobbled toward the urinal as quickly as he could and fumbled with the zipper of his fly. It was in there, somewhere. Seventy three wasn't that old, even for a half lizard. Just then, the familiar warmth crept down his leg. He zipped back up his fly and hobbled toward the attendant. "#^+€<|]hd shah shshs #^|>>| gaga gag jdhdjdhyygsgsh," @matwoolf said. "Gosh sh hahag yiye %#€£|£€* £€~€€." The attendant stepped back and shuddered. @matwoolf tried again. This time with foot and hand gestures. "Oh, paper towels," said the attendant, handing him a sheet. "Now there's a clever fellow."
Incidental characters don't really need descriptions, unless you're trying to paint a picture (mentioning the bartender of a goth club's many piercings, noting the elaborate beehive hairdo of the truckstop waitress, etc). But tertiary characters and above, I think, do need descriptions. It sounds like you have a handle on their personalities, so you can go from there. The high class lawyer has a well-tailored suit, a conservative haircut, and probably visits a health club to maintain his image. The hacker wears hipster tee shirts too small for him, since he thinks he's in better shape than he really is, has an unfortunate complexion and a bad haircut. The eccentrically pretentious artist has a shaved head, deep frown lines and a wardrobe pulled at random from National Geographic.
This thread has made me realise that I never picture my characters. I know their type, emotions and inner character, but I never picture them visually. If you were to ask me now, to describe, physically, the two characters from my WiP, I couldn't.
I'm exactly the same. In fact, I also cannot picture characters in books that I read. I always have a feeling about them, the same way you have a feeling about a friend when you're asked to describe them and cannot. This would be why I don't care for character descriptions in books - a few lines is fine, but not huge long paragraphs with every detail spelt out cus it doesn't matter to me, I still can't see them lol. If a character is portrayed well in their scenes, I will 'feel' them and that is far more effective for me as a reader. For the same reason, I don't really write character descriptions either, and when I do, I write a general impression of them. I never really give proper details on character appearances.
Yup, same here. Although with me, I'm not sure it's a case of can't picture them, but more that it never occurs to me. Like you say, it's better to sense a character from the way he's written, than see them as a solid in your mind's eye.
Even a few lines of description is still description. A whole paragraph is just overkill. For instance, Harry Potter is described as being short, skinny, with green eyes, messy black hair, glasses, and a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. It's not a lengthy treatise, but it gives you a good idea of what he looks like, even if a lot is left to the imagination. Even before the movies made me mentally cast him as Daniel Radcliffe, I had a pretty solid image of what he looked like.
But then, Potter was illustrated on the covers In terms of description, for myself, the kind of character description I don't like is the kind you referred to in Harry Potter. A poet whose reading I went to put it nicely once. He said, he would never describe a man as being 6 foot 3. He would rather describe the man as having a "5 o'clock shadow". I guess I like my analogies and metaphors For me, the shadow conjures an image and emotions. The one specifying the man is 6"3' does nothing for me, and in any case I do not know how tall that is exactly. Tall, I know, but that's too vague for me to really picture, per se.
I like to picture my characters, it helps me immensely. I already have an idea of their physical appearance and their character traits, then I think of an actor/actress that embodies these things and then I use their picture to visualise the character better. Its probably not for everyone but it does help me a lot.
Also, it depends on the type of story, and who is doing the describing. Someone who has to be more aware of physical traits, like a detective, journalist or artist, would mentally take more note of a person's appearance.
What an idiot I feel I read it over and over, putting the emphasis in different places, but it just seemed like complete gobbledegook know matter how I read it. A poet, whose reading I went to, put it nicely once. This I would have understood, but then I always have overdone my use of commas.
I deliberately keep physical descriptions to a minimum, so I wouldn't find this much of a problem. For 'extras' or background characters, I give just enough detail for the reader to picture the scene (e.g. "A sinewy, dark-haired man in a black overcoat"). For my main characters, the only thing I make clear right at the beginning is their gender and rough age. Then I will drop hints about their appearance into my writing, like have another character joke about how short they are, or show somebody eyeing them up in a bar so we know they're attractive. I don't want to be describing the shape of their nose or if their fingers are short and stubby or long and tapered, unless it's relevant to the story. Detailed physical descriptions always remind me of young adult fiction (especially the god-awful "woman looking at herself in a mirror and despairing at how bad she looks when actually we can tell from the description she is gorgeous" cliche), so unless that's your genre I would say stick to vagueness. Your readers are smart and they will fill in the blanks.
@OurJud @Viridian - well, my excuse shall be that these days, I am actually prone to forgetting what I was about to say even midway through the sentence And now it seems my forgetfulness is leaking into my posts!!!
Give only what is needed to push the story along... its easy to get caught up into much detail..... walking through market our hero bumps into a grumpy man apologises and goes on his way..... who cares hair colour...clothing... makeup .... he was there and gone ... but if the grumpy man is more important then place something so the reader can recognise him later on.
My main character doesn't get a physical description because I write him in first person and how the HELL do you describe someone in first person without that person seeming narcissistic or that description feeling out of place? But I have a VERY strong mental image of him (5'10" [which is very tall for the setting; most men were around 5'6 in medieval times], medium-muscular build, 27ish, with a strong, square jaw, straight nose, black hair, green eyes and fair skin with a few battlescars). I know exactly what he looks like. I just can't write it in. Not from his perspective, at least. I will POV switch between him and the King and may be able to work in some subtle description there but there's no way I can write exhaustive descriptions with the POVs I have. His love interest, on the other hand, will gain quite an exhaustive description over the course of the story, because Hale will think about her appearance, and that's appropriate to that specific sub-plot (and Laurel is FAR more than just a love interest; she's instrumental in several other ways as well). And of course... my mental image of her is less clear. She only just decided to show me that she's a redhead. *sigh*
My MC is a shape shifter, so it gives me an excuse to describe his appearance as he shifts from animal to man. For other first person character descriptions, you could do it as a comparison to another character: "She only a little shorter than me, putting her around five feet, nine inches. We had the same brown eyes and dark hair, though she wore hers much longer. And though I broader in the beam, I wouldn't be surprised if she could wipe the floor with me." You get a sense of what both characters look like, without the narrator listing his vital statistics.
This is all great advice, thank you! But technically... the question was how to figure out what your character looks like, not how to write them... But when I finally figure out what my characters look like, I'll be sure to use all of your pointers!
Do you need to know though? Surely you only need to understand the parts of their appearance that have shaped their personality (a burns victim is treated very differently than a beauty queen, and that affects the way they think about the world and other people) or that are important for your plot. As long as you know whether your character is ugly or pretty, has any distinguishing features that others would notice or comment on, etc., it doesn't matter if you don't have a perfect image of them?
I don't know any of those things. lol That's why I asked. These characters that I can't picture are literally just blobs when I picture them in a scene. I don't know body shape, height, weight, hair color, eye color, skin color, or distinguishing features. The list of what I DO know about them is much smaller: gender. The End. lol A couple of them have started coming to me as I write them, but I still have two major characters that I can't see. And it makes it really hard to write their facial expressions and body language when they don't have either of those things in my mind. lol
