A Brief Look at Describing Characters

In any craft, you need to be aware of your materials and their properties. In writing, your materials include the assumptions in your readers' heads.

The same readers will have different assumptions, depending on the genre they're reading. Science fiction and fantasy readers will not necessarily assume your characters are human, for instance, and will be alert to clues you drop that they are not.

But even in a field in which it's taken as a given that characters are human, readers make assumptions you may not be aware of.

For instance, unless you say otherwise, readers will assume your characters are pretty good-looking: not Greek god good-looking, but high-normal. What does that mean? It means you don't have to say it. The author's opinion of the character's looks is both intrusive and unnecessary.

Your character is small, she's black, she's wearing a red dress, and when she smiles, her eyes crinkle. You don't have to tell us she's pretty; we know that!

Now, if she's stunningly beautiful, or ugly, or unusually ordinary, you have to tell us that – though I still think the best way to do so is through another character's thoughts or actions. He walks into the room and strong women go faint with desire. She strolls down the street and children run away. He stands in a corner, and no one in the room notices that he's there.

The fact is, readers don't need to hear directly what you think of your characters. They don't want you to pop up and tell them, "Shallot was pretty," any more than they want you to tell them, "Shallot was good." They are perfectly capable of making their own judgements based on the action in your story.

And the default appearance is high-normal – a much higher percentage of your story's population will be good-looking than are in the real world.

Sheila Hocken, regaining sight after almost lifelong blindness, said one small loss was finding out what people really looked like. In her imagination, everyone was handsome. The same is true in the imaginations of your readers.

So that one's easy. The trickier ones are race and sex.

Go back and read some of the mysteries or (especially) science fiction of fifty years ago, and you'll find that the default character is a white male of about thirty. If your character was that, you didn't need to describe him. Everybody was a white male about thirty until proven otherwise. If someone wasn't, you said so.

"Pat was past retirement age," you said. That meant Pat was an old white male. Or, "Lee was a tall Negro." (You used to say Negro.) That meant male, too. For a woman, you said, "The pilot /doctor / lawyer was a woman – an extraordinary woman." (She had to be extraordinary to make it into those professions and into your story.)

Now, things are a lot looser. There may be a few people left who will make the old assumptions about sex. And there may be more who will make them about race. But you want neither to cater to those assumptions, nor to jolt your reader out of the dream you're weaving.

You need to tell the reader what sex the main character is. It's astonishing how easily the reader can get off on the wrong foot, especially with a first-person narrative. Recently, I read a book in which the main character had a thought – just a brief thought – on page one, that made me think he was a woman. He wasn't. If he'd had the same thought after I'd found out his name was Steve, it wouldn't have confused me at all. As it was, he kept turning female in my mind for the first fifteen pages or so.

Minor characters, and third-person characters are easier, because, of course, you can call them "he" or "she." "The doctor pushed his/her glasses back on his/her nose." Just be sure you've got both sexes hanging around somewhere, because reality includes both sexes most of the time.

Race is hard. If you don't say anything, some, maybe most, readers will think all your characters are white. If you introduce everyone by his or her race, you sound like an idiot. If you only introduce nonwhites by race, you sound like a bigot.

If you have a group of people, you can mention that it includes people of all colors. You can perhaps describe several people together, so race becomes a distinguishing characteristic: "The short white guy raised his hand. Hamilton, that was his name." You can tag people by national origin: "Her Yoruba ancestors . . . " "The ghostly pallor of his Norse lineage . . . " Some writers rely on names indicative of various backgrounds, but that is less and less useful. I incline to the opinion that in a few years, someone named Ma-li Abdul Kowalski may be mostly Irish.

If you're writing science fiction, you can make up racial types: "Type 2b, pale skin, brown eyes," but you can't do that all the time.

Most of the time, describing the color of the skin – white, gold, pink, brown – is probably the way to go, but you have to do it for everyone, not just the nonwhite characters.

Some people think the solution is not to mention the matter at all. Leave out race. Hell, leave out sex and race – suddenly we're on the Planet of the Michael Jackson Clones. Sounds nearly as dull as the Planet of the Thirty-Year-Old White Men.

Nah. Fill your stories with color and sex. Go for it.

Photo: "Eye," by Tyler Parkerson.
Sheila Hocken tells her story in Emma and I (Dutton, 1978).
This article was originally published, in somewhat different form, in The Report: The Fiction Writer's Magazine, #12