6 Elements of Character Appearance that Go Way Beyond Eye Color

black and white male mannequins

Image by DryHundredFear

A black fedora crouched low over his hooked nose and stiff blonde mustache. He hugged his fraying coat tightly around his body, as if he was afraid it would run off on him, like the second button had. But the really curious thing about the man was the half-carat diamond ring squeezed onto the little finger of his left hand.

Today’s topic comes to us from Alex T., who asks:

I was wondering how to pick how your characters look. I know it isn’t that important, but I’m a little stressed about it.

Oh, but Alex, you’re wrong! Character appearance, done right, is immensely important. It reveals character traits—there’s a reason mad scientists generally have unkempt hair.

Choosing your characters’ appearances is a matter of two things: deciding what you want to reveal about their personalities, and asking yourself the right questions.

  1. Physical Basics. Eye color, hair color, skin tone, build, age. Also known as the laundry list, this accomplishes very little for you. It allows your readers to picture a kind of doll, but not a person. Know these details (you can choose them based on the character’s ancestry and possibly class), but don’t focus on them. And for heaven’s sake, don’t write a whole paragraph just about the eyes.
  2. Distinguishing Features. Here’s where we get to the meat. Something noticeable about the character. A misshapen nose, a mole, a gap between the front teeth. This can relate deeply to their past: an old war injury, scars from an abusive relationship, laugh lines, or something they’ve been self-conscious about since birth.
  3. Type of Clothing. Clothing says a lot about your character’s personality, status, and even occupation. It can also do a lot for your setting. A business suit or space suit? Overalls or miniskirt? Denim jacket or a coat of purple dragon fur?
  4. Quality of Clothing. Is it old, new, designer, knockoff, handmaid, hand-me-down? And whichever it is, why? Does your character wish he had nicer clothes, or does he just not care? This says something about your character’s present and past. A man in expensive but old clothes may have lost a fortune. A girl in ill-fitting fashions from the last decade might be wearing something passed down from older sisters.
  5. Presentation. Is your character neat or sloppy? Pressed and buttoned or wrinkly and disheveled? A rich tomboy might wear expensive stockings covered in runs and grass stains. A poor but ambitious man might wear a second-hand suit that is always painstakingly pressed.
  6. Poise. Think about Heath Ledger’s Joker or Tony Shaloub’s Monk. Mannerisms make a huge difference in a character appearance and speak a lot to state of mind. Do they slouch, or stand straight, or point their nose in the air? Do they limp or shuffle or glide or skip? A confident person will stand tall and look straight at you. An anxious person might fidget and look at the floor.

One Final Rule of Thumb:

Don’t describe every detail. You are not reporting to a police sketch artist; you are giving your readers an impression. Pick a few key details and let your readers fill in the rest.

For instance, without looking back at the description at the beginning of this post, can you remember the color of the man’s coat? Black or grey, right? Right. Only, I never said what color it was. I gave you the color of the hat, but that detail allowed you to make an assumption about the coat, and probably the pants and shoes, too.

Now that you know what your characters look like, here’s more help with describing them.

Writing in first person? Here’s how your narrator can describe himself.

Need help building your protagonist? Maybe you need to find his voice! Join us for Voice Week, September 22-26.

Got your own writing question? Drop it in the Suggestion Box.

mannequins

6 Elements of Character Description that Go Way Beyond Eye Color

9 Storytelling Blunders That Make You Look like an Amateur

image of Riker facepalming

Image from Dark Uncle

 

You may be a grammatical black belt, leaping big vocabulary words in a single bound. But take care: you could still be making elementary mistakes that’ll leave your readers cringing, eye-rolling, and yes, even face-palming.

Protect your writerly reputation! Check out these nine storytelling mistakes that make you look like a total n00b—and learn how to fix them like a pro.

 

1. The Perfect Hero: Best We’ve Ever Seen

The problem: Your character is the Best at Everything, constantly impresses the other characters, and frequently breaks rules yet never gets in real trouble. This character is so cliché she has a name: Mary Sue. She’s amusing for awhile, but only as a daydream. She soon makes you look shallow and self-indulgent.

The fix: Give her fears and weaknesses. Trip her up. Relate to your readers by appealing to their vulnerability. As the Pixar geniuses remind us, we admire characters more for trying than for succeeding.

 

2. The Weak Villain: Foiled Again!

The problem: This mistake often goes with the one above. Your brilliant hero thwarts the villain yet again! Perhaps even single-handedly! But if your villain is that weak, you’re not challenging your hero, which means you have no conflict and therefore no story. It’s boring.

The fix: Give your villain multiple advantages over your hero. A bigger army, bigger guns, more political influence. Your hero should suffer greater and greater losses as he clashes with the villain throughout the story, until he reaches his lowest point, and finds some tiny advantage that helps him defeat the villain—probably an advantage you introduced near the beginning.

 

3. Instant Romance: Just Add Danger!

The problem: Contrary to action movie tradition, “we got shot at together” is not a valid basis for True Love, especially when your characters have only known each other for weeks, days, or even hours. Those stories can be titillating, but not moving.

The fix: Give your characters actual personalities, and something within those personalities that suits them for each other. Watch the first twenty minutes of Pixar’s Up or Wall-E to see how it’s done. (Or here’s more help avoiding shallow romance.)

 

4. Exposition: If You’re Just Joining Us…

The problem: Flat-out explanations for past events instead of hinting at them. You often see these in the subsequent volumes of a series to recap events from previous books, but you’ll also see it in standalone books to reveal heroes’ personal histories, or even to remind the reader what’s happened so far. It’s awkward and often boring.

The fix: This is a classic example of when you should show, not tell. Don’t say it, convey it. Here’s how to get rid of background exposition.

 

5. Laundry List Descriptions: Check, Check, Check

The problem: Describing every character with the same handful of features. Hair color. Eye color. And every article of clothing. You’re trying to give the reader a complete picture, but by the third or fourth detail their eyes are glazing over.

The fix: Pick a few details that inspire your readers to fill in the rest. What would strike you when you first met the character? What would you remember about him later? A unique mustache? A discoloration of the skin? An elaborately pocketed cloak? Focus on these details and give minimalist descriptions for the rest.

 

6. Surprise! It Was All a Dream

The problem: You coax your readers through some tragic or thrilling scene and then jerk them at the end by revealing it was only a dream. Unless you’re writing the next Inception, do not do this. It’s a poor attempt at increasing tension, which ends up feeling more like a broken promise.

The fix: If you must include a dream sequence, make it obvious from the beginning of the scene that it is a dream. Preface it with “I had another dream last night,” or fill it with surreal, dream-like qualities.

 

7. The Idiot Class: They’re All Like That!

The problem: Portraying a people group, often a religious or political organization, as nincompoops. In amateur YA fiction it’s common for all the adults to be idiots, while the kids cleverly fool them at every turn. Unless you’re writing farce, this makes you look shallow and bigoted.

The fix: A few fools are fine, but if you want to be taken seriously, include people with depth on both sides of the conflict. Don’t make your hero—or his cause—infallible.

 

8. Mini Morals: Holier Than Thou

The problem: The hero sidesteps from the plot onto a soapbox for some religious, political or ethical cause. It only lasts for a few lines of dialogue, but it’s spammy, like when you’re talking to a friend about your favorite movie, and he segues into all the reasons you should join the Church of the Lonely Potato. It’s annoying even if you already belong to the Church of the Lonely Potato.

The fix: If you’re going to have a moral or message in your story, the entire story should work to tell that moral, and you shouldn’t flatly state it at the end like in a Saturday morning cartoon. Instead, demonstrate it through the events and consequences of the story.

 

9. Pop Culture References: As Troubling as Justin Bieber

The problem: Modern pop culture references date your work and break your readers’ suspension of disbelief. In five years, is your Gotye reference going to make you look cool or out of touch? And blatant Blazing Saddles references do not help immerse me in your medieval dragon world, Mr. Paolini!

The fix: If your world isn’t connected to our modern world, avoid references entirely. If you’re writing about the future, you have more leeway, but stick with icons that have proven staying power (Bieber will likely follow Aaron Carter into obscurity, but The Beatles are safe territory). Bonus tip: reference your own made-up icons that are popular in your futuristic world.

 

Are you guilty any of these mistakes? What other amateur writing blunders make you cringe when you read them?

 

riker facepalming

Whatever you do when writing your novel, don’t do these nine things.

5 Ways to Build a Detailed World Without Boring Your Readers

Photo by InterdimensionalGuardians. Interesting.

Photo by InterdimensionalGuardians. Interesting.

It’s the year 2053. Earth has made first contact with an extraterrestrial race; socialist aliens who reproduce asexually. You, now a literary giant, are tasked with adapting a sample of Earth literature for the aliens to enjoy. The book is Pride and Prejudice.

You open your well-worn copy to that famous first sentence, It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife…and you break down in tears, realizing this tale of class and marriage will mean absolutely nothing to your audience.

Universal truth, your foot!

Yet this is the challenge science fiction and fantasy writers face every day.

We create whole new worlds to house our stories, then find ourselves struggling to keep up the pace while stopping the action every few paragraphs for a history lesson.

But we don’t have to! With a few tricks of Show, Don’t Tell, we can show our readers a lot about our world without slipping into exposition. The close-up details of our heroes’ personal lives can reveal the big picture of the world they live in.

Like so:

1. Your protagonist’s job

…and the jobs of the people he knows say a lot about your world. If they’re all farmers, your readers see an agrarian community. Make him a moisture farmer in a desert, shopping for robots, and he’s Luke Skywalker. Or make him a starship repairman or a dragon breeder. Whatever the occupation, in one conversation with buddies at the pub about how hard work has been this week and what the government is up to, you can cover:

  • The major industries of your world
  • Who controls them / has the power
  • The biggest problems with society

More useful tools along these lines:

  • Living quarters (cave, tent, cryotube, barracks, fortress?)
  • School/studies (from a blacksmith’s apprenticeship to a mind control science project)
  • News reports (from the town crier announcing the war to a psychic message about falling nanobot stock prices)

2. Your protagonist’s relationships

How was he raised? Does he live with the wife and kids? The wives and kid? Seven generations of his family? Coworkers, classmates, cellmates, refugees? No one at all? This all reveals:

  • The society in your world
  • The structure of the family
  • Barriers between the classes

3. Your protagonist’s traditions

Does he pray before he eats? Does he have to slay a beast to be acknowledged a man? When he attends a funeral, is he watching a body buried, burned, scattered, eaten, or recycled? Do they even have funerals? This reveals:

  • Religion – who they worship, where they came from, where they go when they die
  • History – holidays can be used to reenact important points in history

Traditions can include:

  • Daily rituals: getting up, going to sleep, eating
  • Life events: birth, coming-of-age, marriage, parenthood, funerals
  • Holidays: festivals and fasts

*Pro tip: A liturgy, specifically words sung or recited at any of these events, can be an especially handy way to sneak in detail.

4. Your protagonist’s speech

Language, slang, shop talk, and industry buzzwords are all great tools to both plant clues and add personality to your world. For instance, your can make up your own:

  • Terms of endearment or insult (honey, jerk)
  • Titles (husband, wife, king, priest)
  • Curse words (…)
  • Greetings (hello, hi, good day, hey y’all, yo)

5. Use the appendices, Luke!

Your readers will usually be able to interpret casual references to foreign concepts by the context. But to include more detail, you can always add appendices at the back of the book. Tolkien and Herbert, renowned for their world-building in Lord of the Rings and Dune, both did it. Use footnotes to lead readers to things like:

  • Glossary of terms
  • Translations of foreign words
  • Maps
  • Summary of religion and history

What are some of your ideas for showing your world to readers? Tell me in the comments!

Thanks to Sky for suggesting this topic! If you have a writing question you want answered, leave it in the Suggestion Box!

little green men

Great show-don’t-tell world-building tips for sci-fi/fantasy writers.

 

How to Stop Boring Your Readers with Scenic Description

Photo by David Herrera

Photo by David Herrera

You go to visit some friends you haven’t seen in awhile, and find yourself sandwiched between your hosts on the couch with a giant scrapbook over your lap like a seat belt, as they show off the half million pictures of snow-capped mountains they snapped on their most recent vacation.

While we introverts may actually appreciate this in lieu of starting a conversation, it isn’t exactly entertainment. And here’s the awful truth:

You may be doing it to your readers.

In writing, this sin is known as scenic description. No matter how artfully you describe those snow-capped mountains, if it’s longer than a few sentences and not relevant to the plot, it’s boring.

The difference is, your readers don’t have to politely “ooh” and “ah” for two hundred pages. They can simply shut the book.

That brings us to two rules for scenic description:

Rule Number One: Less is more.

Don’t interrupt the climax with a description of janitorial supplies purchased in bulk; just give the reader a sense of the area—if possible, mix it with action—and move on.

Rule Number Two: Scenic description should do more than describe scenery.

Whenever possible, make description do double duty: for instance, use it to illustrate your character’s mood.

This doesn’t mean make it sunny when your hero is happy and rainy when he’s sad: you can use any scene and any type of weather to convey any mood, simply by changing your tone. A sunny day can either warm the cockles of his heart or blithely mock his pain.

Let’s take a noisy tavern as an example:

The creak and slam of the door cut out the howling wind and heralded the music within, so loud he had to shout his order in the barmaid’s ear before taking a seat by the great fire. The crackling of the wood lay down a kind of beat for the lutenist at the other end of the room, who dared the revelers to keep up with his quick fingers. Thudding boots made empty tankards dance on the tables, and spirited singing from the depths of barrel chests dissolved into thunderclap laughter each time a lyric was slurred.

Versus this:

The hinges screeched, the door slammed, and the clamorous indoors suddenly choked off the soft moan of the evening breeze. He had to scream his order to the barmaid, and even as he huddled, sweating, next to the coughing fire, he couldn’t hear his own thoughts over the revelers at the other end of the room, whose discordant bellows and guffaws shook the rafters, dwarfing the lute accompaniment to a tinny whisper.

Notice the facts are the same, but the words I use to deliver those facts have different connotations. First, the positive connotations of words like heralded, great, quick, dance, spirited, laughter. Then the connotations feel of words like clamorous, choking, scream, sweating, coughing, discordant, guffaws, tinny.

The result: you feel, rather than read, the mood. Another example of Show, Don’t Tell.

What are some other ways scenic description can do double-duty? Tell me in the comments!

Archives for the Holidays: Show, don’t tell: what it means

I’m feeling better for the first time in five days! How are you?

To stay on top of the Christmas cheer, I’m posting some of my favorite posts from the archives. This one was originally posted on October 7, 2011.

It’s the first rule of writing. We hear it all the time. In fact, it’s almost all we hear. Over and over again, they tell us…

Show, don’t tell.

Show; don’t tell.

Show! Don’t tell!

In the name of all that’s good, what the heck does that mean???

Find out >>