I believe the amount of description depends on the genre and the publisher. I read somewhere, a while ago, that romance publishers don't want their writers describing the female lead with too much detail, so that their readers can relate to her. However, I have also noticed that specifically in the romance genre, nearly everyone has emerald green eyes. It makes them all sound like monsters. I noticed that John Grisham very seldom gives his characters much description, unless someone has a physical defect or attribute that affects how the character is able to function.
Noooo it makes them striking and rare and hints to their inner qualities! That said I prefer grey eyes in my romantic leads, and maybe this is some monstrous personal bias, but I have it on good authority that people with grey eyes are intelligent and exciting and substantially better than average in bed. So, you know... *bats eyelashes*
unlike say "blood red lips and hair blacker than a raven's wing" In thrillers its a 50" chest and a background in special forces
Yes and no... if you think about the difference in the 'image' you get of someone who we're told looks at us with small, glittering, almost black eyes... and another someone with washed-out grey or overlarge gooseberry eyes. They can have an impact, even on how you think of the character, in just a handful of words...
Yes, indeed. And I do include eye colour, even if just as "brown eyes". It's where you look when you talk to someone, you know? You see people's eye colour even if your don't take it in all the time. And it lets you show who is who's parents or siblings, and, well is it too much to suggest that your characters should be reasonably striking and distinct from the background? Not like perfect and gorgeous in every way, but when you only spend two words to let the reader see their face as they talk? Yeah that's worth it. They stop being a blank face. And if you have romance in your story... Seriously, who doesn't see something special in their partners eyes?
But there are so many more interesting ways you could influence how a reader thinks about a character. Hair colour and eye colour = yawn.
I'm not saying it's scintillating prose, I'm just saying that it's worth 5 words to give us that sense who is talking in a way that character kinda doesn't. We definitely should spend much more time hearing about who they are, no complaints there. Just that it's going to take a while to discover who all your characters are and at least being able to go that this one has dark hair and brown eyes, and that one is blonde and blue and at least we can tell them apart.
Such as? And why not have both if we think we can get away with it? We're trying to intensify the experience for the reader here, so all tools are valid (or expendable if they get in the way). Remember, a lot of readers like being given those details, even if they're going to use them to put together a different image than the one you has author have in your head (there's a reason why most popular novelists put them in, after all; and me, I think it's because the readers like them) Me, I prefer a metaphor or piece of imagery ("he was all twiggy limbs and haystack hair and spiky attitude", "looked like a sulky shopworn Barbie doll," "eyes like a landed shark,")... but that's me.
That's why I asked how many of us don't care about eye and hair colour. Judging by this thread and the likes on that post (which I assume mean "I agree: I don't care about hair and eye colour") most readers don't like being given those details.
This is a writers forum though, not a readers forum. I grant you that writers don't like it so much but I think it matters to the reader. For the writer we know the difference between our characters and we know what they look like without saying anything. We don't like words that seem to do nothing or words that seem clunky. But the reader needs to see your characters. They need to know them as people too, and they will with time. But it does matter to the reader to have a little something more than a stick figure for each characters appearence.
It also occurred to me that I've invariably found it easier to rustle up an interesting description - without the eyes/hair/skin/height conventions - when the character is, shall we say, less than conventionally attractive or beautiful. Which could be one of the reasons why romance or fantasy does like to use these factors, as the main characters more often than not at least goodlooking if not wildly attractive, and their eyes or hair are easier to write descriptively than the features which are normally only noticed if they're, err, unusual (when was the last time I read a heroine's ears being inventively mentioned? or chin? Nose maybe, in a hero with a Roman one or {shudder} 'hawklike' one....)
That's certainly true. In a story where many of the main characters are going to be, for want of a better phrase, generically attractive then these cues are certainly much more important. I just got done with a book set in a beauty pageant and let me tell you, keeping nine girls who share a lot of similar character traits (competitive, driven, terrible self esteem, problems with their mothers) feeling as distinct characters, even as background characters, that's literally impossible if you can't use hair and eye colour. They're all pretty; they're all gorgeous in that slightly plastic way; but I can rattle off the top of my head hair and eyes for the whole lot, and character traits too, but they literally have to stand in a line on stage and be distinct from each other while changing outfits and makeup and it's just... You got to give people something.
You could be right, but I read it more as "I don't like having to give those details for my characters and don't think it's needed."
Try reading a Barbara Cartland or three (hey my elderly relative was addicted to them and as a kid I read everything and anything I could lay hands on. Like the Gor SF books another one laid up....) Every. Single. Heroine had exactly the same heart-shaped face, enormous eyes (made me think of anime, yes) pointed chin, rosebud mouth, small fragile form, fluttery hands..... The only way you could tell them apart was hair and eye colour and ridiculous name.
To someone who doesn't visualize things that I read that well, ya'll talking about not being able to tell characters apart without a visual cue is wild. Characters who aren't mine are sort of vague staticky blurs attached to their name, not their hair color. Am I taking this too literally / misunderstanding hyperbole, or do some people genuinely find characters hard to differentiate without hair-and-eye-color type descriptions? Because honestly if I found myself having that problem I'd assume it was a problem with the prose. IE that these characters didn't have different enough personalities.
I mean telling them apart in the early few chapters where we don't know their personalities. All my pageant girls are distinct characters but it's going to take a while for us to discover that Amy misses her boyfriend and Connie just wants to pop pills and forget the stress because when we meet them on stage they are all just being driven and competitive. I mean, I do think that you should be differentiating characters by character in the grand scheme of things. That's what should be happening in most of your book, you don't need to keep reminding people which one is which because they know these characters. But it's such an author thing to think that because eventually your characters will stand for themselves as interesting individuals that the reader is going to be able to tell them apart in the first chapter. Like "But obviously her dialogue is just so her..." but that only makes sense once we know that this is actually something distinctive about her. What's distinctive about Connie in the first instance is she's ginger and wears her hair in bunches. What's distinctive about Amy when we first meet her is that she has ash blonde, pixie cut hair. Just having those details means that we know that they aren't someone else we met earlier but didn't get the name of, we know they are someone else.
To follow up on this point; to those who don't like hair and eye colours; how do you feel about Reservoir Dogs' character details? Are we seriously saying that we can't possibly say what people look like, but that 'cigarette guy', 'talky guy' and 'tooth pick guy' are anything better? They are still just cues to let us pick out the cast members we've seen before without needing to know who they are as people, they still take just a couple of words and honestly they tell us little about the characters themselves. You can read as much into someone smoking as you can to how they choose to wear their hair, you know?
Not at all (though in the case of the beauty queens... well, maybe and if you have no description at all, are enough readers going to stick around for the different personalities to show through actions/dialogue?) As I said, I like physical descriptions that are word-and imagery-based better myself. But a lot of people like it, a lot of readers want it, and others... don't. Maybe the word 'should' in the thread title is the sticking point, since that seems to assume there's a right answer, and there really isn't except in each individual book or story. Comes back to the piece of string mentioned on page 1....
Probably. Because there is no should. I can come up with plenty of reasons why you'd have none or extremely minimal of this stuff and if that fits your style and your story then you should do that. I'd certainly never say never and I can come up with reasons to do that. But... Still for me, the only reason not to say what people look like at all is because you want everyone in the story to look the same, to give it a detached and impersonal feeling. It just feels a bit... What's the expression? Writer-wanky? To say you don't want to include hair colour because it's boring and really your prose always strives to be better than that. Well, sometimes you just have that this story is set in London. Sometimes you just have to say it's 10:00am. Sometimes there's things we need to know. Perhaps not hair and eye colour specifically in your work, but to remove things that the reader wants or needs to know just because you don't like it is just... How many times have we all said that your book needs to be written for the audience and their tastes and not yours?
For me, actually, yeah. Kinda. Like, imagine you have two characters. They're both ex-marines. They went AWOL together and became mercenaries. They're best friends, have the same sense of humor, and they're constantly bouncing jokes off each other. They have very similar personalities. I can't tell them apart. Now pretend one of them is skinny, short, with close-cropped dark hair. He has sharp eyes and he's a fast talker. He's a little deaf--from gunfire--but can read lips. He's Hispanic and knows several languages. The other one, George, is six foot seven, lots of tattoos on his arms, some of them bad, some of them good. They claim their names are George and Lenny. If I had that physical description, I would find it easier to remember which is which. Even if they have basically the same personality (because they're best friends and sort of bounce off each other). But it's easy to remember "George is the short one" and "Lenny is the big one." It's more details to connect with. Even if it's never mentioned again. I really don't care about hair color and eye color, but... like... I think most readers do want to picture something. It's the same as describing the setting. You don't need to describe the exact color and weave of the curtains, but is the room shabby? Expensive? Peeling wallpaper? Hand-painted walls? Cold? Toasty warm? A physical description can tell you a lot about something.
Doesn't that require using epithets like "the girl with the pixie cut" etc.? I tend to avoid those and just stick with names. I'm going to be calling the character Jo throughout the entire story, not 'the brunette', so I'd rather associate their actions with the name as quickly as possible. Like, okay - having not read your beauty queen example, I can imagine that a lot of these girls meet each other at the same time / in rapid succession. In that case I can see names not being the first thing that's given to the reader, for sure - plenty of sizing up the competition and evaluating them based on looks (to be fair, kind of the point of a pageant, so ... maybe not a fair example, really) well before you know their names. But do you keep doing it? Do you keep reinforcing how the character looks by calling them 'the brunette' etc? Because my style is to give a brief description of the character on introduction and refer to them by their name throughout without ever really bringing their appearance up again unless it's relevant to the plot (eg the short character I mentioned a couple pages back whose shortness is A Problem for them on multiple occasions) or maybe come up in dialogue ("You seen a dark-haired guy about yea high go by here?"), or they didn't have much of introduction and it's been a while since we saw them, I suppose (It was the extraordinarily tall guy from the bar - Bob, she was pretty sure). I don't know, the idea of differentiating characters by appearance past like, line two of their introduction is foreign to me. For me 'the tall one' and 'the short one' become Bob and Jo as soon as I know their names, and spending multiple chapters telling them apart by the distinguishing feature of "he sure is tall" doesn't compute. Even if it takes that long to get any inkling of their personalities. I guess I also feel like personality should stick out to some degree much sooner than that. I definitely don't think that a reader should be getting my characters mixed up in the first chapter and I don't see how that's 'such an author thing'? If you finish the first chapter and you're going "Who the hell are these people again?" I'm going to feel like I failed, as someone whose work is supposed to be character-driven. I mean, by the same token, it's probably not great to assume that you know the reader specifically does want to know [character]'s eye color. Maybe they don't care. As long as it's not intrusive they probably don't care that you did tell them, either, but clearly plenty of writers - who are also, I would hope, readers - don't find it that interesting. So personally I do write for myself and my own tastes, because I assume that other people share them. Not everyone, of course, but uh. Some of'em. @Tenderiser at least Ironically, in LAFS one of the main characters is chronically, semi-willfully terrible at names, so I do use epithets to some extent when writing their bits. Can't take my own damn advice. Even then the unnamed characters are largely referred to by profession rather than appearance. Iuno.
That would be it! I much prefer describing characters through the eyes of another character, usually an adversary. I use one of my protagonists to describe two of the villains in the story, all within dialogue and allowing the story to flow naturally. And, if you think Book-3 of ASoIaF is lazy writing, just wait till you get to A Feast for Crows, which will be the last I ever read of the series. Martin has descended into cheap melodrama for teenage boys! (an example from my WIP) “Dear God! I’ll have words with Gael for allowing such crude stories to fall on tender ears. Bloody hell. As I was saying, whilst departing Saint-Florent, seeing to my voyage home and taking care that my trunk had been safely stowed, I caught a glimpse of two men standing on the wharf, the one conferring with the other. I felt their eyes had just left me, and it pricked up the hairs on my neck. I had seen them before. The one, who seemed to preside over their affairs, was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested. A wild boar of a man! But to his credit, he was impeccably turned out in a fine embroidered coat, his hair immaculately coiffed like a doll’s. His partner was of a more dainty build with small, wet eyes. Ever alert was he, like a ferret who’s spied a clutch of robin’s eggs. These two had a vicious air about them; it held the promise of dire consequences if certain conditions weren’t met. I’ll do well to never cross paths with them again.”
