I'm writing a story with main characters that are aliens and some very non-human looking. For example, the narrator, Ophelia, is 6'9" and has a cow skull for a head, while the rest of her body is made up of smoke. (Her body is like a human's but without any defining features, i.e boobs, or genitalia) I'm writing in 3rd person limited, and I don't know how to tell readers, "hey this isn't a human", without coming across really stiff, or just info-dumping because she looks in a puddle. I've tried subtly, like "Her skull scratched nearby trees" or "Her smoke rose into the night sky", but it comes out of nowhere, and feels like being hit with a frying pan. TL;DR How do you describe very non-human characters, in either 1st or 3rd person limited, without it being weird?
In 3rd person limited it's common to begin scenes or chapters in 3rd objective, which means the 'camera' isn't attached closely to the viewpoint character as it will be most of the time. This allows you to show an 'establishing shot'—a broad landscape or a shot from some distance that includes your characters as a group. You want to then transition from this objective viewpoint into your POV character. Let me link you to a blog post where I discussed this with a few very helpful people of this message board: Switching between close and distant 3rd Be sure to read through the comments as well, lots of good stuff discussed there. Anyway, the point is, you can describe your POV character in that initial establishing shot before zooming in and dropping into 3rd person close. I would use it to describe the whole group and do brief descriptions of the most important ones individually. Just about the way you did above.
And of course throughout the story you can drop in things like 'Having something like a steer skull for a head and a body entirely made of smoke, she wasn't able to manipulate objects the way you or I could, so she had to... ' I guess I'm saying I would use a narrator who isn't the main character. Hmmm, not entirely sure what that would mean, would it need to be an omniscient narrator? I suppose that is what it means. I know a lot of science fiction is written in omniscient. I think it makes a natural choice. If you really want to stick with 3rd limited, you could do things like that through dialogue instead, or internal monologue. You know "Say Dweetula, how do you open mayonnaise jars, not having hands and all? How do manipulate any physical objects at all, being made of smoke?"
Of course it could be done more like this: 'Her body consisted entirely of smoke and hung together in a more or less humanoid form, drifting and shifting now and then, and her head resembled the skull of a terrestrial steer.' And then you shift right into your standard 3rd person limited.
Thanks! I was thinking about doing a "zoom in" type thing with the narrator, but wasn't sure how to, thanks for the link!
I would also recommend looking at a few books written in 3rd limited, see how the authors handled some specific things. Once you've got the theory in hand, you want to look at real examples by good writers. You want to learn to 'read like a writer'. It's very different from the passive reading ordinary readers do. When you've gotten really good at reading like a writer, then you'll be more able to write like one!
First of all, that's one hell of an interesting character description. Yes, describing your POV character in 1st or limited 3rd is always tricky, which is probably why so many writers resort to the dreaded "looking at myself in a mirror" scene. Xoic made some very good points, so I'll just add some thoughts about description when you're not writing in that expanded viewpoint. In a close POV, you're basically writing the narrator's thoughts, so if you want to describe her body without it feeling jammed in there, then the description should result naturally from the action and how she'd react to it. Say you want to highlight the fact that Ophelia's body is smoky and insubstantial. Then you put her in a situation where that matters: Or consider how her weird attributes help or hinder her. Basically, the same rules apply here as when you're describing *anything* from a character's POV: describe what's important to them, when it's important to them.
One other important factor that gives you a little leeway is that since it's third person, the POV Character isn't the narrator. There's a disembodied narrator who remains very discreet and uninvolved. This means you can describe the POV character without needing to do it through her own viewpoint. Meaning it isn't going to be her thinking about herself in ways that she wouldn't normally. The narrator understands that it's human beings reading the story, and that they need a little context and a few relevant factoids. Here, just to show that I'm not making this all up, here's an article about 3rd Person Limited going into some detail about the disembodied narrator. This disembodied narrator is what I was gropingly trying to allude to above in Posts #3 and #4.
Sorry to keep popping back in with new insights, but this is my first time thinking through some of this stuff in such high resolution and I'm having little revelations. I believe the disembodied narrator would describe the viewpoint character not in visual terms... wait, not quite right. How to say it? The narrator would use indirect description rather than doing it visually through someone's eyes. Interesting, I'm able to understand this concept now because I wrestled so hard with direct and indirect thought/dialogue on my blog over the last couple of days: Directly and Indirectly Reported Thoughts (inner monologue). My thinking is that an indirect description would be like this: Her body was of smoke, her head the skull of a steer. While a direct visual description is more like this, describing it as a character would see it: Her body was strange—I seemed to be seeing right through it to some extent, and it swirled. Smoke! It was made of smoke! Or seemed to be, and the head, floating there in the air, was the skull of a steer with a six foot wide sweep of horns arcing out from it. In fact, this seems to be the difference between showing and telling. Interesting, the more I learn about these things the more they all begin to coalesce and merge in fascinating ways. The narrator is telling the reader what the POV character looks like, rather than giving a detailed visual description (showing). Telling is also known as narrative summary, because it's summarized (stated briefly and concisely) and takes place in the narration.
