Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014

The outward show
Character building

They say, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” But, alas, when it comes to people as well as books, we do. We pick out future friends and ignore others with no more information than looks, a tone of voice, a laugh. This is our fifth tool for character development—appearance, the outward show. I wrote about the subject after comments like this one from Fighting Irish Fan 1111, who wrote, “Any suggestions about how to approach looks, personality, and other descriptions would be great!”

We judge more than people in an instant. We judge animals, too. That cockroach may be a friendly little guy, but most of us think he’s gross. And this giant panda may be cruel to his pet bunny, but we assume he’s gentle and sweet.

Let’s talk about me for a minute. I’m very short. I never made it to four foot eleven. My actual height is beyond my control, but I could wear high heels. I don’t. I’d rather be comfortable than slightly less short. That choice says something about me. My posture does, too, I suppose. I’ve worked at it, and I stand pretty straight, which probably gives me an extra eighth of an inch of height. Am I obsessing? Height is important to the vertically challenged, or at least to me. What flats and good posture convey in a story may vary, depending on other aspects of the character. Or these details may be all we decide to give the reader. Not much, but in a minor character we need no more than a quick impression.

Before we even get to clothing, there are lots of ways people and characters define themselves through appearance. Here’s a prompt: Write down every element of physical description you can think of. Just a list. Don’t do anything with it. These are a few items to start you off:

• A slouch (bad posture).

• Bow legs.

• Small eyes.

• A tattoo or many tattoos.

• Muscular.

See if you can get a page or two in your list, a few words to a line. Add to the list whenever you think of or observe something unusual. With your list in mind, watch people over the next few days.

Notice that I included in my starter list both characteristics that have nothing to do with the personality inside the body, like small eyes, and characteristics that are based on a decision, such as a tattoo. Include both kinds in your list, which can become a resource for you whenever you write physical description.

I was riding the New York City subway not long ago. Sitting across the aisle was a woman who seemed to be looking at me beseechingly. I couldn’t tell if she meant it, and I didn’t know how she did it. She said nothing; she wasn’t crying. But I got a sense of sadness and need. Was it the blue eye shadow and the bags under her eyes? I don’t know. I do know that she sat pigeon-toed, and the turned-in toes added to the woe somehow. The eyes and the toes would go on my list.

I’ve discovered that if I try to describe a character strictly from my imagination, the result isn’t very interesting. I typically write about size of features, eye color, hair color, whatever comes most quickly to mind. Looking at actual people is much better, but I don’t like to stare, so I go to photographs and portrait art. For example, when I wrote The Wish, I wanted the main male character not to be either classically handsome or hideous. I went to my high school yearbook (from 1964—yikes!) and paged through it.

The possibilities astonished me. We may not want to go into all this detail in a story, but the shape of every upper lip is different, and the space between the lip and the nose is different. In some faces the width or narrowness of the chin determines the curve of the lips. In other faces, lip shape and chin shape have nothing to do with each other. For The Wish, I found a boy whose eyebrows met over his nose, forming a unibrow. I never knew the owner of the eyebrow (our graduating class was very big), so I have no idea whether it ruined his high school years or didn’t affect them at all. I lifted it off his face and gave it to my character, and that unibrow helped pull the plot along.

For A Tale of Two Castles, I looked at drawings by early-sixteenth-century artist Albrecht Dürer and found a profile view of a youngish man with a plump face; uplifted eyebrows under small mounds of flesh, as if he might sprout horns; a flat nose with two bumps; small lips; several descending chins, the topmost of which stuck out almost as far as the tip of his nose. I couldn’t possibly have made him up out of my imagination.

When we’re creating physical description, we want to design a face and a body that go with a character. This Dürer portrait doesn’t have a face I’d give to a poet. It’s a shrewd face. I bet he can add a long string of dollars and cents in his mind. I suspect he can size up a person in a second. He could be a merchant or a shady character who lives by his wits. In my book he became Master Sulow, leader of the local acting troupe, who is exceedingly shrewd.

The meaning of a characteristic will vary from person to person, just as the habit of interrupting from the last chapter had a different cause for Theo and for Beth. Take Theo, who slouches. This habit may mean he feels too tall. Or his father always told him to stand straight, so, rebellious by nature, he trained himself to slouch. Or he admires an actor who slouches. You may be able to come up with three more reasons for his bad posture. Try it. Write them down and save them. Then give tattoos to Beth and invent five explanations for them. Write these down, too.

In our story about Theo we may tell the reader why he slumps, or we may not. His posture can just become one facet of the reader’s idea of him. Ah, yes, the reader thinks, this character would droop. Our reader’s understanding of him will grow as she amasses information, because we’re using our character development tools.

Let’s move along to the fascinating and mostly voluntary aspects of appearance: clothing, hair, and, for female characters primarily, makeup. Here are some questions we might ask when we’re designing a particular character, and most apply to male and female characters alike:

• Does she dress (and do her hair and makeup) to draw attention to herself or to disappear?

• What do we learn about his taste from looking at him?

• Does she wear the “right” thing or the “wrong” thing? For example, does she show up for a picnic in clothes that mustn’t get dirty?

• How much choice does he have? Do his parents pick out his clothes? Can the family, or he himself, not afford much in the way of fashion? Is he color blind (color blindness is more common in males)?

Write down three more questions you can ask and save them.

These are two examples of character description. The first comes from my book The Wish and is told from the first-person POV of MC Wilma, who adores dogs:

Suzanne was tiny and perfect and had a teeny voice that carried a million miles. She reminded me of a Pomeranian—fox face and needle-sharp bark, and nervous, darting brown eyes.

Ardis, on the other hand, was tall and bigboned and regal. She was African American, with the shaggy hair of an Irish water spaniel. Her nose was hawkish, but her eyes were huge and an amazing blue-gray, and her mouth was made for lipstick ads.

And the second is from Go and Come Back by Joan Abelove, which is told from the POV of a South American tribal girl. In this paragraph she’s describing the arrival of two anthropologists from the United States:

They looked like plain old gringos to me. One was very tall and skinny, with long yellow hair. The other one looked a little more like us, nice and fat and not tall, but her skin was a funny shade of pink. Her hair was not black enough or straight enough. It was long, but she had no bangs. They both wore no beads, no nose rings, no lip plugs, no anklets. They didn’t pierce their noses or their lower lips. They didn’t bind their ankles or flatten their foreheads. They did nothing to make themselves beautiful.

Wow! In this one we don’t learn only about the newcomers. We also find out something about the appearance of the narrator and others in her tribe.

Now that I’ve described some options, let me add that we probably don’t want to stop our story for a half page of description whenever a new character shows up. We can present a little bit for a first impression and drop in more as we go along. For example, in M. T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Octavian’s mother is first merely called a “great beauty,” and a few pages later her smile is portrayed as “slow-spreading across her soft and radiant features.” That’s it. Her good looks interest the reader, who waits willingly—I did—for more as the story progresses.

Time to read and think and write!

• Look at a few of your favorite books and notice how each author handled introducing the appearance of the first character you come to and how detailed or sketchy this description is. Then revisit some of your own old stories. If you decide you might have been more inventive and you’re in a revising mood, try a new way or more than one. Go to your list for characteristics you haven’t tried before.

• This is to be done the next time you’re among strangers—in a store, a park, a sports stadium, wherever. Listen to voices without looking at the speakers. Form an image. If you can, jot down a few notes. Now look.

• Leonard is at a Halloween party dressed in a spacesuit. Without removing a bit of his costume, find a way to describe him as he looks the rest of the year. Find another way. And another.

• Look at photographs and portraits, but not of models or movie stars (not of physical perfection). Find one that interests you. Describe the character that might belong to the body—or go against type and describe a personality that seems accidentally planted there. Write a story about him or her.

• Your MC Victoria is starting a new school at the beginning of your story. She’s nervous and wants to make the right impression. Depending on her personality, she may want to fit in or to surprise people or even to shock them. Describe her in her own words. Don’t have her look in a mirror, because mirrors as a vehicle of physical description (and as portals to another world) are so overused that we want to stay away from them unless we can do it in a new and surprising way.

Have fun, and save what you write!