Comments on: Don’t Describe Your Characters?

By: Eli James

Eli James — Mon, 28 May 2007 00:18:24 +0000

Betsy: I have very limited fashion sense, so the descriptions of a characters clothes just blows right over my head …

But I love authors who give scanty descriptions of their characters: Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre described Jane as plain and Mr Rochester as ugly, but not how exactly they were such. And that allowed my mind to create images of them, as I wished.

Oh I enjoyed Jane Eyre tremendously.

By: Betsy

Betsy — Fri, 25 May 2007 19:00:07 +0000

Reminds me of the famous Mark Twain quote, “Don’t say the old lady screamed, bring her on and let her scream.” As a reader, I seldom care what a character looks like unless their looks will play specifically into the plot. I do love to know a bit about how they’re dressed. Not every little detail of their clothes, but sometimes it can say a lot about them.

By: Eli James

Eli James — Tue, 22 May 2007 14:45:41 +0000

@Ming: A whole mini novel?! Ehheh. ^.^

@Nina: One man’s meat may be another man’s poison. On the contrary I found the book to be very satisfying (and boy your list of examples must’ve been hard to copy and paste). But maybe I enjoyed it because I had been book starved for a good month.

At any rate it sprung to mind immediately when I thought of showing and not telling on a character in a novel.

@Richard: I’d say you show and not tell in Undead Flowers. So much action to tell us how your characters worked and thought and functioned. And I think that’s the main draw of books over movies: we construct the characters of a story in our mind, rather than having them handed to us with all their imperfections.

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 18 May 2007 17:58:46 +0000

Describing people. Oh dear me yes. One thing that I’ve really noticed with my self-imposed limit of 350 words per blog entry is that there is literally no time for me to describe anything physical. I’ve got to tell the story and I’ve got to get the emotion across.

This really did make me sit down and think about how to depict the characters. Partially I try to do it through the ‘show, don’t tell’ approach.

But partially I think I rely an awful lot on the reader to fill in the blanks. At times I feel like I’m writing a cartoon or something.

I’m not entirely satisfied with this approach–but I do at least try to focus on emotional verisimilitude to get the characters to connect with the audience.

That was an interesting and thought-provoking post, thanks.

By: Nina

Nina — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:56:14 +0000

As you say, Lionel Shriver gives example after example after example after example after example after example after example after example example after example after example after example after example after example after example after example example after example after example after example after example after example after example after example. Enough. I kept thinking, make her stop. Each example is unrelentingly evil, and many readers chalk this up to the fact the Eva is an unreliable narrator. I chalk it up to bad writing. No one can overwrite like Lionel Shriver. It’s the controversial content (A mother who hates her child! A high school killer!) that has garnered attention, not the writing.

By: ming

ming — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:25:51 +0000

Call of the wind, was a whole mini novel based on that premis! great tip!