I finished getting dressed, and turned my back on the mirror. I didn't have time for some long-winded inventory of how I looked. I had a killer to catch, and a case to close.
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| Who needs to know what I look like, anyway? |
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How Often Do You REALLY Look At Yourself?
It's an author's job to communicate important information to the audience, and one of the things that we often get hung up on is how our characters look... and specifically how our protagonist (or at least the POV character) looks. Now, if you're in a third-person omniscient view, this isn't really a problem as you can turn the all-seeing eye of the narrator on anyone you really want to. However, if you're settled firmly into a single character's perspective, it can be tough to find a way to explain to your audience just what they look like.
Even if their appearance is particularly unusual... for folks who read my novel Old Soldiers, our protagonist Pollux is a 9-foot-tall albino supersoldier. It was important to convey that, but it was tough to do so in a way that felt natural.
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| Seriously, go check it out! |
How do you bring across the important things about your character's appearance without just having them look in a mirror and give the audience a description of what they're looking at? Well, there are some things you can do:
- Mention Things Matter-Of-Factly: If your character strokes their beard when they're thinking, or they nervously rub a scar between their knuckles when they're thinking, just mentioning those details cements them in your audience's mind. Whether your character wears glasses, they sport a Rolex watch, they have thinning hair, or they have a naked patch where they used to wear a wedding ring, all of these details can just be mentioned as part of the story as your prose unfolds.
- Describe The Environment From Their Perspective: If someone is a tight squeeze into a car, we can infer that makes them physically large. If they have to duck through doors, they're probably very tall. If they're constantly looking down on or up at people, that also implies their height. And so on, and so forth.
- Describe What They're Doing: Characters who jog regularly tend to have a certain amount of physical fitness. Those who put a lot of plates on at the gym likely have a powerful build. If going up stairs is difficult, we can infer they're physically weak, or that they're dealing with some kind of physical problem that's hard for them to overcome (leg injury, old age, heart condition that makes activity difficult, etc.). The way someone walks, the things they're capable of, etc., helps us paint an image of them.
- Have Someone Else Comment On Them: What other people say about a character reflects a lot about what they notice. Is it a woman in a romantic scene saying something like, "I could lose myself in those blue eyes of yours," or a cage fighter sizing up your private eye by saying, "You ever thought about getting in the ring?" implying that they have the build of a fighter? This can be a useful way to bring things across without stating them outright. Even something like a movie or play director remarking on your protagonist's features, while overblown, can be a way to give an impression of them.
All of these are ways to give your audience an impression of your character's looks. What you shouldn't do is have your character breaking the flow of your story to wax poetic about their bodies in a way that feels unnatural, and is just in the text to tell your audience what they should be picturing. Whether it's a man looking himself over in a mirror at the gym, or a woman commenting on her body in the most Men Writing Women sort of way (typically complete with full breast and hip measurements), these descriptions can take your reader out of the flow of your story, and leave them rolling their eyes.
Lastly, consider this question; does your audience need to know what your protagonist looks like? Is it important for the story that the audience know they have a craggy face after a lifetime of exposure to the elements? Does it matter if they know your POV character is exactly 6'2" and 210 pounds? Or is their personality coming through in the way they carry themselves, the choice of their dialogue, and the way the people around them react?
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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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