Character Descriptions: KISS

Character Descriptions: KISS

Apr 14, 2021 | Editing

This topic comes up a lot in the social media writers’ groups, so let’s talk about it a little bit.
Over-described characters tend to be a mark of a novice writer (or a jaded pro adding wordcount to drive up the price). But let’s be honest here. The more skill you develop, the more efficient you can be with fewer words, deploying them more elegantly in succinct and thought-provoking ways. If wordcount has any relation to a writer’s skill level, that relation is an inverse one.
When it comes right down to it, the specifics of a person’s clothing, eye color (etcetera) rarely really matter in any narrative sense; and like colors or spices or fonts, they can be easily overdone.
So:
It’s better to underdo it than overdo it.

You can look at this two ways: as a reader, and as a writer. Here’s my reasoning:

  • As a reader I usually don’t need to know much about what your characters look like – I have an imagination of my own and my mind will fill in any details that you haven’t specified for particular purposes – but I do need to know what they SEEM like (to the POV character or narrator).
  • As a writer I need to give you an evocative idea of their type and demeanor, but I can let you do the rest of the work yourself. I will only mention a specific body part or describe an article of clothing if that is the most efficient and poetic way of getting across the idea of this person. It is the IDEA OF THIS PERSON that I need to communicate, not the details of their taste in fashion, and I find that a short clause (like “work-scarred hands” or “haunted eyes”) can say a lot. This is not a movie, I am not a painter. If a few adjectives or a nice metaphor will do the job perfectly, there’s no need for any more words.
Keep It Short, Shakespeare.
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LUMINARIUM Released!

Dec 8, 2020 | Editing, Words in a Row

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Dark Evasion

Bright Manifest

1 v 3 POV

1 v 3 POV

Mar 22, 2019 | Editing

One difficulty in writing first-person prose is the inability to describe the MC’s personality and appearance. Because people rarely ever describe themselves (especially not as a narrator would), this can make visualization and emotional identification tricky; usually too heavy or too light. Because of this difficulty – in addition to other things, like a heightened sensitivity to failures of tone, and a tendency to feel claustrophobic – people tend to find first-person narratives harder to get into, and easier to fall out of. Most readers (and publishers) prefer third-person.

On the other hand, one advantage of the first-person POV is the ability to literally sit inside the character’s head. This can give your story a degree of conceptual continuity and reliability that an outside voice may not have, but that continuity will be subjective to the MC.

The second point should offset the first. The advantage must outweigh the difficulty.

When reading a first-person narrative, the MC’s subjective world becomes the reader’s default view, and you should be able to explain *why* you’re doing it that way. It’s not like first-person is the only way to interiorize the inner dialogue of characters; a semi-permiable omniscient narrator is all you need for that. In third-person works, it’s even possible to shift the POV from one character to another (usually by chapter but occasionally by paragraph); writers do this all the time. So you see, the shift to the subjective POV is not simply a stylistic checkbox.

Taken seriously, this will change everything about your story. In choosing first-person over third-person you are changing not just the “camera position” (as you might when choosing one POV character over another), but rather the entire teleological purpose of your tale. Rather than telling a story of characters doing things, you are enacting a character going through things.

This is a big difference.

A first-person work replaces the objective world with the internal world of the MC, going far beyond a mere change of camera position. A fitting metaphor might be to say that it provides a pair of glasses through which the world will be experienced, though this metaphor falls short because the world isn’t limited to vision, or even to material objects; it also includes feelings, emotions, connections, abstractions, motivations, relationships, etc. We have to imagine the glasses as not a camera position in the exterior world, but rather everything about the MC’s interior world, including the character’s own understanding of the exterior world. When the MC changes, the glasses change.

This takes us back to the poor reader, and the importance of offsetting their difficulty with your advantage. After all, one can’t put glasses on without being aware that they’re doing so, and therefore the fact that you’re even making them wear the glasses has to be justified. The justification will be found in the purpose of your story, and the purpose of your story will be interior. Instead of a stylized narration of ostensibly objective events, you are presenting the reader with a subjective monologue, a modulated chain of interior states, and you couldn’t do it any other way.

It is not an understatement to say that no matter what happens “out there” in the fictional world, the first-person story is actually about the glasses.

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TL/DR: Most readers prefer third-person POV. If the purpose of the story isn’t interior to the MC’s understanding of their world, the use of first-person should be questioned.