Fascinating article by James Woodhere, from last Saturday's Guardian, about creating character.

I just love his archetypal apprentice opening paragraph! So true, and I'm sure I've been guilty of it in my time...

Emma

That's really interesting stuff, Emma! Especially about how less can be more and the lacunae can tell us as much as pages of intimate description.

I'm less with him when he is scathing about the Amazon reviewers and book club members who demand warmth. As a reader I know I need characters I can identify with. I can admire the craft of a book where all the characters are cold and distant but I wouldn't enjoy reading it. What's wrong with wanting a book peopled with characters who can be liked?

And, me too, I'm sure I've done the looking at a photo thing! It's such a useful tool, to use when one charcater is thing about another (like Lizzy Bennet and Darcy's Pemberley portrait). My concern was that it had become a cliche - it never occurred to me that it made the one looked at 'static'. And anyway, that is the way we struggle to know one another, isn't it - in snatches? That was the whole point of Lizzy staring at Darcy's picture - she was attempting to build a rounded picture from the snapshots she had had, and the reader goes through the same puzzle with her. (Sorry, just rambling now...)

Rosy

I'm making heavy use of a photograph album in the novel I'm writing at the moment, and make no apology for it. For me, such an object is universal rather than a cliché - in fact, when does one become the other?

TMOL is full of looking at pictures - I don't think it's quite as simple as 'static' or not. Maybe it's one of those 'either less or more' things: it works if you do make 'heavy use' and the album or whatever becomes a real emblem/metaphor/structuring principle in the book. Less so if it's just a one-off device for describing someone, in which case it might work better to find something livelier.

Emma

Was he saying beginner writers often used the device in lieu of exploring their characters in action?

I've read the article before and I still find it quite hard to follow his opening argument.

Isn't it true in books as in life that we get lots more information about people from what they do (and how they do it) and what they say (and how they say it) than from what they look like? In life we get loads of stuff from people invisibly, intuitively, we are experts at detecting undercurrents in others, and the real writer's art is to convey those kinds of clues (and cues), surely. I especially like it when the physical aspects are left to the reader's imagination almost entirely, and I think that a writer, working in this way, should maybe allow the reader to attach his or her own physical associations onto whatever behavioural characteristics are being described, rather than the reverse process. I think the effect of this process is to create a vigourous, living being for the reader, because its a being in whose person the reader him/herself has played a part in creating. Kind of.

Pete

I agree - I actually don't know much about what my characters look like, except where it's significant to the plot (usually inherited colouring or some such) and I certainly don't write even that in very often. It's all in the actions. But then, as with so many things, it's easy if everything's seen through a character-narrator. All you have to ask yourself is what would they notice or not notice, and then what does or doesn't get mentioned seems natural to the reader.

Emma

I use photographs a lot in the novel I have been posting on this site. The story concerns the main character's obsession with her lost first love. Because he now exists for her only in memory she uses photographs as a kind of porn, to induce memories & to help her to go back in time.

Photographs are also pivotal in the plot because it is through a photograph that her 'secret' is discovered by her daughter.

I haven't read the article, I will try to scout it out

<Added>

God I'm dozy, I've just realised, you have included a link to the article. I read it as being by someone called James Woodhere!

He raises some interesting points although to be honest I got bored and didn't get to the end, a wee bit too much academic masturbation for me!

Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to "know" them; they should not be "stereotypes", they should "grow" and "develop"; and they should be nice

Do you think he was being deliberately provocative here? Does anyone want the characters they read (or write) about to be 'nice? I know many people (including me) want characters they can care about but surely this isn't the same as niceness?

Also, I wasn't sure what he was saying about 'knowing' a character. At one point he seems to be saying you can't really know a character if information is withheld by the author, but at another, that we can feel we know a character on the basis of very little information as long as it captures their essence.

I may be completely off here, I have the attention span of a goldfish & I didn't concentrate very hard so if I have misread it then apologies in advance.

I've just remembered that in the novel I've just submitted the female MC looks at a photo of someone briefly at one point. But the person in the photo is dead, so maybe that's an excuse for 'staticness' in a character!!

I agree with you, Cholero, I prefer as a reader to imagine appearances for myelf, and as a writer never describe characters' physical aspect - or very rarely. The exception tends to be where another character is admiring their hair or eyes or whatever - normally due to being in lurrrve - in which case it's an essential part of that person's viewpoint).

Rosy

Emma, I'm intrigued you say you don't know what your characters look like - do they not appear in your head almost as they would on a screen, or as if you were with them in real life, watching them? If not, how do they make themselves real to you?
C

I'm usually writing from the MC's PoV, in their voice, so I see what they see, which doesn't include them, of course. I know exactly where everyone is in the room, sitting, standing, where they move - the choreography - but not the close-up. It's more like seeing a stage than a screen. And only a rough idea of what kinds of things they wear, either, unless it's particularly important for a particular character or moment.

I do know which of tall/short fair/dark, fat/thin they are, and that's about it. Their faces are out-of-focus. Though I was amused that though I had a fair idea of what Anna looks like, but nowhere in TMoL does she describe her own physical type - you know she's dark and not specially short but no more - my sister described her to me in minute detail, and was absolutely right! So I suspect more is somehow conveyed that I'm aware of.

Emma

Emma, I'm glad you don't know either! I couldn't tell you whether Martha in H&M is dark or fair, tall or short, though I did give her brown eyes for some reason - nor do I know what any of the other characters look like, with the exception, for some reason, of occasional minor characters who do pop up cinematically (like Letitia Gladwin in H&M, and also Dame Emily, whom I can see very vividly). Physical appearance is (usually) entirely peripheral to me, because what I'm interested in is what's going on inside people's heads.

Margaret in MTLL had to look a certain way (tall and slim, very pale complexion and loads of long dark hair) because she is a heroine from a Victorian novel transplanted into the 21t century. Elizabeth Gaskell had already described her for me! But the rest of the cast have no particular physical attributes. Even when, in my books, characters look at one another with 'the eyes of love' (as lovers, or parent-child) they tend to notice things in tiny snatches - a shoulder or a wrinkle of the nose or a tilt of the head - without necessarily thinking about height, build, hair colour, etc.

It's the same with clothing. I cannot, personally, stand books where you have to be told what the heroine is wearing all the time (Sara Paretsky comes to mind - pacy thrillers I otherwise much enjoy - why do care who designed the woman's flipping suit? Chick lit novels that do it also drive me nuts). I might mention it if it's relevant - a mother cuddling up to her child's fluffy dressing gown, or Richard in MTLL noticing Margaret's blouse because he can see he underwear through it!! - but unless my characters are noticing clothing for some reason, why should I? (And I guess I also don't tend to write about people who care much about clothes.)

For me, this isnlt weird at all. Only one (male) reader so far has commented on the lack of information about physical appearances in H&M.

Rosy

I wonder if this isn't the key to the old literary/genre debate: that literary writing isn't really about elegant style or philosophical profundity or any of the things which seem to usually attach to the term, but rather about the level of sophistication applied to depicting character. Simply put, that in generic fiction, the character remains the same right through the book (Rebus for example, even though Rankin writes with plenty of sophistication otherwise) or Sam Spade or whoever, whereas literary fiction approaches character (and the reader's attitude to the character) as changeable, in flux, different in different situations etc etc, and that the literary writer is interested in the impact of life and experience on the person, whereas the generic writer works the opposite way around.

Just musing.

Pete

I think the series detective is a special case, because he's the fixed point round which the stories revolve, and that's much of the pleasure of reading them.

More generally, it's an interesting point, but I don't think it's a broad literary-commercial distinction, I think it's a broad women's-men's fiction distinction. The absolute core of most women's fiction, however literary or however commercial, is the change in characters between the beginning and the end, because the propulsion of most plots is relationships and feelings. Whereas in most men's fiction the propulsion of the plots tend to be action and event, and the change between beginning and end is what you might very loosely call political: the situation and allegiaces of the protagonists change, but their actual characters don't much.

Emma