Carrying on a bit further from last week: Describing your point-of-view character can be tricky. If you’re in omniscient viewpoint, you may not need to; even when the omniscient narrator has an unusual voice and decided opinions, he/she isn’t a character in the story whose physical description is relevant. In omniscient, the writer can simply describe each character, including the main one, as he or she appears in the story, in as much or as little detail as seems appropriate.
Where omniscient can include pretty much anything the author wants, including the character’s personality traits, skills and/or knowledge they have not yet displayed, and details of their past, current, and even future life, camera-eye is limited to the strictly physical elements that a camera might record. The writer can still describe any character, as long as the “camera” viewpoint is that of a movie. If, on the other hand, the writer chooses a “first-person perspective” camera (like the one in some video games), describing the main character has all the difficulties of both a camera-eye (limited to the strictly physical) and first-person (in that the camera never actually “looks at” the main character, so the only way to describe him/her is indirectly).
In first-person and tight-third person, the main character is the viewpoint, and it can often seem impossible to have them describe themselves in a way that is both plausible and realistic. A viewpoint character who can happily say of another person “She had midnight hair that curled in loose waves down her back and huge green eyes in a heart-shaped face. Her figure was the envy of every other woman in the room – it curved in all the right places, with not an ounce of misplaced fat or muscle” is going to sound pretentious or vain if the description is first-person, and not much better if it’s tight-third.
The real problem here is that most people a) don’t have a realistic idea of what they look like, and/or b) don’t spend much time thinking about what they look like overall; they’re more inclined to think “Did I manage to clean off all the spaghetti sauce I dripped down my shirt at lunch, or does it still show?” So the writer has to find reasons why the character would think about their appearance. (Note that these techniques can easily be adapted to most viewpoints, except camera-eye in some instances.)
In first-person, about the only way I know to get away with a detailed two-page lump-o’-description for the main character is if the first-person narrator is introducing him/herself to the reader at the start of the story, and it really only works if the character has a good, in-character reason to dump all that information on the reader right up front.
More common – and usually easier – is revealing information about the main character’s appearance/life history/skills/etc. over the course of the next few chapters. A reasonably good rule of thumb is to begin with any key elements that might startle a reader later, if they’ve created a mental image that doesn’t fit. Bear in mind that the reader’s personal image may be at odds with your description no matter what (In my head, Ivan Vorpatril is blond, even though I’ve read something like fifteen or twenty novels in which he has dark hair and Lois regularly takes me to task over that fact whenever I mention it.)
For a viewpoint character, one of the simplest ways of “describing” him/her is by using comparisons with other characters as the viewpoint describes them. “He was at least three inches taller than I am, and I am not a short man.” “Her wavy brown hair was a couple of shades darker than mine – not quite black, but you could mistake it for that in dim light.”
Another easy way to work in self-description harks back to the fact that people tend to think most about what they feel is unsatisfactory about their appearance. People complain about their appearance, they worry about their perceived flaws, and they wish they looked some other way. Maybe they’ve always wanted some other eye color; maybe they’re toying with the idea of dying their hair blue or getting a tattoo. Maybe they hate their hair, or they’re self-conscious about the crooked little finger they broke in a bike accident when they were eight. Maybe they hate the dress code at their office (or maybe they dress that way anyway and don’t understand why other people fuss about it).
One can use comments other characters make. Anything – from “Did you find those shoes in a rubbish bin?” to the classic “You look different today. New haircut?” “New glasses.” – can add to the reader’s mental image of the viewpoint character. Other characters can also make comparisons or comments that imply things about the viewpoint. “Have you met the new guy? He’s even taller than you are!” or “I just found out that Janice is even more of a clothes horse than you are!” imply things about all three of the characters (the speaker, the new guy or Janice, and the POV character that the speaker is comparing the new people to).
One can even use the old standby of having the character look at themselves in a mirror. It’s been overused to the point that most writing advice books recommend against it, but there are still times when it is thematically or dramatically appropriate. What leaps instantly to my mind is a vampire POV glancing in a mirror…and, of course, seeing no reflection. They could then go on to describe what they think they would have seen if they had a reflection, though after two hundred years without a reflection, they could be wrong.
“Most people don’t have a realistic idea of what they look like…”
It is far most common for folks to concretize their self-identity age twenty or so. Whatever ravages time may impose over the following decades then become at odds with this picture of themselves to the point where a close examination in a mirror can be accompanied by a lack of recognition (Dorian Gray notwithstanding).
How important is it really to know what a POV character looks like? Besides some readers’ preference that is…
A number of professionals say that the main character should have the least amount of description so that the greatest number of readers can identify with her/him. Note Asimov’s situation in the last blog.
As a reader, I don’t care in the slightest, and in fact am fairly oblivious even if the author does a good job of putting description in.
As a writer…. My ex-writers group insisted that they couldn’t identify or empathise with my characters because they didn’t know what they looked like. Now, my ex-writers group had Issues, and maybe this is another case where I should ignore the heck out of them. But since I’m bad at character physical description (because I don’t care, as above), and I don’t truly understand why anyone *would* care, it remains an area I struggle with.
This is just my personal preference, but I like it when books include character description because I have a visual imagination; I like being able to have a clear picture of the characters for the movie that’s always playing in my head when I read.
Which is why “how much description” is always a balancing act between the writer’s preferences and the fact that there are readers out there at both ends of the spectrum. Too much description, and it bugs one set of readers; too little, and it’s a problem for others.
Well, how important are the reactions of the other characters to the POV character’s appearance?
Well, I did have a heroine look at herself in the mirror in my latest work in progress. Then she is desperately trying to convince herself that she is not going to be fairest of them all when she grows up, which will upset her mother.
I also used the mirror thing, before I knew how overused it was, but I still think it works – the character thinks a lot of himself, and was trying on new clothes.
People complain about their appearance, they worry about their perceived flaws, and they wish they looked some other way.
One of my ex-writers group suggested getting my MC to self-describe by having her think about how much nicer her daughter’s looks were than her own. The implicit assumption that any character, especially a female character, must hate her own appearance said a lot more about the critiquer’s self-image than it did about my MC.
I suddenly want to write a vampire novel just so I can use that mirror idea.
Characters don’t need to fret about every single aspect of their body image in order to have one or two things that bug them. Or that just inconvenience them, like being too short to reach the top shelf, or too tall to get through a doorway without ducking. A point-by-point comparison where the POV character comes off worse in every regard would squick me more than a little, but most people don’t do this. They compare what they see are their weak areas to someone else’s strengths – they envy the curly/straight hair, but don’t notice the bitten-to-the-quick nails on Person A, and notice the perfect manicure on Person B, but not the straight/curly hair they don’t want.
Yeah, I think it was the critiquer’s assumption that *every* aspect I was trying to convey (height, weight, hair color, eye color, you name it) could be done by that sort of comparison that particularly put me off. Though really, that character was extremely not appearance conscious; the things she was likely to admire in others and wish for herself were things like the patience and persuasiveness to verbally wrangle a situation where punching or shooting wouldn’t do.
Y’know, I’m realizing as I’m thinking about this that I don’t do that. No wonder I’m having trouble conceptualizing it for a character! Maybe my next “stretchy” project should be writing a character who really wishes she looked like that-person-over-there.
(Not that I’m claiming to be perfect. We all have our issues; some of us just keep them in a non-standard location.)
Even from reading these comments, it appears the “right” amount of description varies from person to person… For those of you on the minimalist side of the spectrum, I think Ms. Wrede is exactly right when she says, “A reasonably good rule of thumb is to begin with any key elements that might startle a reader later”. So I at least pick descriptives necessary for the plot to make sense.
For example, I had written a novella about an older cave explorer who had lost her legs in a caving accident ten years ago. I didn’t mention her disability until page-2, and a few readers _lost_their_minds. They wanted it right up at the top, perhaps the first line (I felt her disability was only part of the character’s identity, so to bring it up as the _first_ image was disrespectful).
If you’re looking for examples, I think describing a character’s disability was handled well in the Vorkosigan Saga books.
That’s a really interesting case. Being disabled may not be the most key part of a character’s identity, but it’s going to be the first thing others notice about her, and it’s going to have an effect on everything she does. I can see how that would be jarring to a reader – but I can also see the challenge, esp. if this is your pov character.
I have a story with a disabled character; it was work to get that wheelchair into the first scene, and she wasn’t even my pov. I’d be curious to know how you ended up handling it.
The story was in tight 3rd person, and she was alone, so being disabled wasn’t the first thing the character thought about. Instead, I started with her dangling from a rope, startled and little fearful about a possible intruder in the cave. I just felt that to hook the reader, I needed to establish setting and the precarious situation first, the character description second.
Only after establishing the hook, did I have the character think about how she used to climb ropes before the accident, and how she did it now–but only because she was rushing to safety. Plus I got to add in her attitude about her disability (she is tough, and saw some positives in it). I liked that part.
You can read it for free via my website if you want to see it.
I once described a character’s face in one chapter, and in the next described what he was wearing; and “And the wheelchair, of course,” and described it. In that order.
Description of characters’ clothing seems to be getting short shrift here. It seems to me a lot more plausible that a POV character would look in a mirror to inspect his clothing than his physical (body) appearance. For that matter, a character would be more likely to think about his clothing than his physical appearance, although one could work in some bits about physical appearance from the way the clothing fits (or doesn’t fit).
An error that quite a few male writers used to make – it’s less common now – is to have a female PoV character (in modern Western culture) who’s happy with or enthusiastic about her appearance. Yeah, it can happen, but there’s a fair amount of societal pressure to ensure that it’s quite rare, and many female readers in particular will be put off immediately unless there’s an explanation for it.
Really? I think you’re making a gross generalization here to assume that a female character who’s happy with her appearance is by definition an “error”.
If it’s no longer the case, then that’s great news. Certainly about ten years ago it was described by a publisher as actively annoying a lot of female readers – unless there was some kind of explanation for this unusual attitude.
If the character went on and on about how wonderful her appearance was, I’d think that would annoy most readers of whatever gender. If, however, the character was merely satisfied with her looks and left it at that, I have to wonder if that wasn’t that particular publisher’s personal peeve, presented as universal fact.