Descriptions and Depictions
And Decisions and Revisions (Which a Minute Will Reverse)
Every time I remind you that I’m a more-is-more type person I am legally obligated to follow up with an article on how actually less is more after all. Truth is, sometimes less is more, sometimes less is less, sometimes more is more—I don’t think more is ever less—every rule is a candidate for being broken, there are no absolutes, “good” and “bad” will always be subjective determinations, and everything is meaningless so why bother.
As I wrote in Fashions and Fictions, the belief that concise writing is inherently better than any other kind is a direct line from the patriarchy. Using a lean and direct writing style, like Ernest Hemingway, is great. Using an elaborate and intricate writing style, like Toni Morrison, is also great. Popular or commercial appeal don’t mean things are badly written. The works of Dickens and Shakespeare were popular entertainment in their day.
When it comes to what “good writing” is or isn’t, truthfully good writing is what anyone likes to read. If you enjoy reading something, that writing is working for you. If a lot of people all agree that something is enjoyable to read, that writing is working for right now. There are fewer rules than you think. The most important thing in writing is making sure that your words are understood and that the reader receives the meaning you intended to convey. That’s the rule. Everything else is additional.
I mean, yes, I keep a 1200-page book of writing rules (CMS) within arm’s reach at all times, but not because I’m a writer. I keep that around because I’m an editor. That’s a whole other thing.
Anyway: Making sure your words are understood in the way you meant them isn’t as simple as writing down what you think. All of us make assumptions about everything all the time, assumptions that are colored by our knowledge and experience. When we write we make assumptions about what readers will understand from our words based on what we understood them to mean when we wrote them. When we read, we make assumptions about what the writer meant based on what we understood and assumptions we made.
Something that comes up in critique groups all the time: Someone has written something unintentionally ambiguous. The writer felt it was perfectly clear what they meant but a variety of readers with different experiences understood something else.
Example: I brought a scene for workshop one time that involved two adult women, one younger (Woman A) and one older (Woman B), and a young child. I thought it was very clear from what I had written that Woman A and Woman B were friends and neighbors and that the young child belonged to Woman A. My readers let me know that they were unsure how any of these people were related. What I had thought were carefully placed, obvious context clues were not received that way by the readers.
Today’s Shelf Life is all about verbal description and how to do it well. I’m not going to give you any writing rules. I’m not the writing police. But we’re going to go over some principles of how people generally interpret the things they see and describe them so as you’re writing from any point of view you can apply these principles, alongside what you know about your narrator, to create descriptions that feel genuine and convey the meaning you intend.
People are always giving glib writing advice like “show don’t tell” and then strolling away with no explanation of what they mean or how to do that. I try not to be the person who gives that advice because the world does not need more. A large part of the Shelf Life creative process is lying on the sofa looking at the ceiling and thinking through the things that I believe I cannot explain to people who want to learn from me.
Whenever someone asks me about a skill and my knee-jerk reaction is, “Oh, I can’t explain how to do that, I just kind of know,” that’s a red flag for me that I learned this skill implicitly rather than explicitly and I haven’t given any critical thought to it, I just absorbed it into myself at some point and began thinking of it as part of my natural gift for being able to read something and know whether and how it needs to be edited.
That is not a natural gift. No one “just knows” good writing or storytelling. Humans are born with almost no instincts and certainly no instinct for judging the quality of writing. Yet I have built a successful career on the premise that I am someone who can look at a piece of writing—any type of writing—and improve it, even though I received very little information about how to do this during my education.
When I encounter one of these things that I think I just kind of know how to do, I dissect the skill until I can communicate it in a way that is more meaningful than just breezing through a critique group and dropping a pearl like, “Oh just read a lot and you’ll get a feel for how to do it!” That is not useful advice.
One of the things I see all the time in fiction drafts is descriptions that don’t work. They feel out of place, they feel off, they feel like way too much, they feel like they’re telling instead of showing, or they feel like expository infodumps. You don’t want any of those things in your manuscript.
Many times this comes down to the writer wanting badly to convey their vision with a level of exactitude that the reader doesn’t need or want. We have all these details solidified in our mind—we know exactly what the castle looks like, we know exactly the specific shade of blue of the main character’s eyes, we’ve calculated exactly where the sun would be in the sky at the time of day when the scene is taking place—and we want to share all of it.
As a writer, we need to fight that instinct all the time. In practice, one or two details apiece is enough to distinguish even a large cast of characters from one other. There is no need to go into long, detailed descriptions of individual characters’ physical appearance. First, no one wants that. Second, it’s too much for readers to keep track of. Third, it’s complete overkill. How much do we know from the Harry Potter books about what Hermione looks like? She has bushy brown hair and brown eyes and pronounced front teeth. That’s it. The rest of the details get filled in by the reader’s mind or with an image of Emma Watson or whatever. Pretty much every character in the entire saga gets two physical details that we use to distinguish them from everybody else.
When you’re describing characters, put yourself in the narrator’s position and consider these two truths:
We don’t describe ourselves to ourselves
We don’t recognize others from their component parts
File this under Tropes I’m Tired Of: A character is looking in a mirror and cataloging their physical characteristics. No one does this. You don’t get up in the morning and get in front of your mirror and think, “Ah yes, there are my wideset, blue eyes, the blue of cornflowers and spring skies, which darken to the blue of a deep lake when I’m thoughtful. And there, my black hair that was so wavy when I was young but which has grown straight as a pin with age.”
People use mirrors to check the aspects of how they look right now—Is my tie straight? Are my bra straps showing? Do I have anything in my teeth?—and not to contemplate their overall appearance. When I’m getting ready in the morning I might think that my hair is sticking up in an unbecoming way or that it needs to be cut soon but I never think, “There’s my hair, it is brown and cut in a short pixie style. A no-nonsense hairstyle for an all-nonsense woman, how incongruous I am.”
But you’re dying to tell us what your main character looks like. You know every detail of their physical appearance and you want to work it into the story. There are ways for characters to self-describe that can feel authentic, that show rather than tell:
Jam, the narrator of Pet, styling her hair in twists with shea butter while she talks on the phone.
Bella Swan joking that she’ll blend in better in Forks than in Phoenix because her skin is very fair and prone to burning.
The other way we understand the distinguishing characteristics of characters who are narrating is in the reactions other characters have to their appearance. Just be mindful that it’s equally unrealistic for another character to meet your main character and begin describing them in detail. People don’t do that in real life. As I’ll note later, people notice what is out of their ordinary. That is what someone is most likely to comment on.
“What happened to your nose? Did you break it?”
“Nothing. That’s just what my nose looks like.”
Even when we are attracted to someone or newly in love with them, we don’t sit around making a long list of their physical features. We might obsess about their overall attractiveness or fixate on a particularly appealing characteristic or two but we’re probably not making long lists of attributes. This is not a Dungeons and Dragons character sheet. I know some of you will feel called by that but it needed to be said.
We Don’t Recognize Others By Pieces
The people we know are not the sum of their physical parts. At least, that’s not how we recognize them. When computers do facial recognition, they do it by categorizing the features of a given face and then measuring the distance between features. When a human looks at another human’s face and recognizes it or doesn’t, we do that in an entirely different way called holistic recognition or holistic face processing. You can read about that here if you like science.
The main thing is that we—most of us, I can speak on the topic of face blindness—don’t add up someone’s facial features and get to recognition: We don’t say, “that eye shape plus that eye color plus that nose shape equals Bob.” We see a face as a unified whole and we know it is Bob. That said, if someone has a distinctive feature that stands out to us, then when we remember their face that distinctive feature might come to mind. I knew a woman named Carla about 20 or 25 years ago and when I think of her I still remember her absolutely flawless skin. Try to think about what distinctive physical feature your character might have and keep description limited to that one, most noticeable, thing.
We Notice What Is Meaningful to Us
Whenever a character (or a narrator) notices something, what they notice gives us just as much information about them as it does about the thing they noticed. Sometimes more. I used this example from The Silence of the Lambs recently:
“You know what you look like to me? With your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube.”
Hannibal is describing Clarice but we don’t learn anything about Clarice in that moment. We already know that she’s completely out of her depth, that she’s been put into a situation she’s ill-prepared for, and we already know from her backstory (the book) or her accent (the movie) that wasn’t born into the polished professionalism she’s trying to impersonate. We only learn something about Hannibal—about his powers of deduction and his oddly specific knowledge of women’s accessories.
When one of your characters is describing something, they first have to have noticed it or they wouldn’t be describing it. The very fact that they notice what they do, while other details go unnoticed, gives us information about the character. How many men would notice the brand of a woman’s shoes and purse, and know the associated values? That information is meaningful to Hannibal.
The things your characters notice tell us a lot about what is meaningful and important to them. Let’s say a late-model Dodge pickup truck pulls up and a prom queen climbs out. If the character observing this is a salt-of-the-earth farmer who does all his shopping at Walmart and the local hardware store, he would probably notice a lot of specific details about the truck but he might not notice any specific details of the prom dress beyond “it’s pink.” If the character observing this is his savvy daughter who left home at eighteen, and went to NYU and practices business law in Manhattan, she might be able to distinguish details of the pickup truck (grew up on a farm) and also important details of the prom dress. If the daughter’s love interest, a Manhattan-born socialite and fashionista, is also observing, she won’t notice anything about the truck beyond “it’s red” but would notice every detail of the prom queen’s dress, hairstyle, accessories, and makeup.
We Notice What Stands Out From Our Norm
Every animal that uses a brain to process information relies on pattern recognition to stay alive. Pattern matching is how our ancestors looked at a series of bushes and figured out which one was food. It’s how they looked at an environment and determined whether there was a dangerous predator there or not. When we look at anything, pattern recognition is what helps us quickly say, “yes, this is what I expected to see” or “wait, something isn’t what I expected.”
When we see what we expect to see, we don’t notice. We take notice of what we don’t expect to see or what is different from our expectation, our norm.
In practice, this means that characters are unlikely to describe the things they see all the time or expect to see. If your characters live in a society where everyone has brown skin and dark eyes and black hair, they’re unlikely to note that a new person they meet has those features. They are instead likely to notice other characteristics about someone they have just met that stand out in some way from what they expect to see. If they meet a person with blonde hair, they are almost certainly going to notice that. Those are the things that rise to the level of a character describing them.
In a given environment, we stop noticing things that never change. Your character is not going to walk into his bedroom and describe the room in his mind to the reader. He sees it every day and it doesn’t change. He’s only going to notice what has changed. Is a window unlocked when he left it locked? Has someone disturbed his bookcase? Left a note on his desk? That’s what you tell the reader.
The character would never notice the presence of a window, a bookcase, a desk that he sees every day. But noticing the things that are out of the ordinary will show the reader that a window, a bookcase, and a desk exist. You don’t need to first establish that there is a desk, and where it is, and what it looks like, to put a note on it.
When Description Is Meaningful to Story
Is the physical description of your character, or one of their physical characteristics, important to the story? Sometimes the answer is yes and most of the time the answer is no. When you’re deciding how much detail to give on character appearance, consider how it’s meaningful in the context of your story.
Does it matter what color Ron Weasley’s eyes were? Do you even remember? Harry Potter’s eye color, on the other hand, is an important plot point for seven books straight. Likewise, in Twilight, it’s important to know what color a vampire’s eyes are because that gives you direct information about how recently that vampire has fed, and on what. What color are Lyra Belacqua’s eyes, or Jo March’s, or Jay Gatsby’s? No one cares because it is completely immaterial to their stories. We know what color Lyra’s tongue is. That’s what’s important.
A practical exercise in character description: Describe yourself physically in 250 words or fewer. Now put yourself in your parent’s or child’s shoes—how would that person describe you physically in 250 words or fewer, do you think? What about your best friend or significant other? If you don’t come up with three very different descriptions, I’d be surprised.
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