Wondered if anyone had thoughts on how you describe your MC physically without 'info-dumping'? This seems particularly hard in the first person....


<Added>

Sorry, should have expanded on that a little. Obviously it will come down to the specific details of your story, but I just wondered whether anyone could think of any particularly good examples of this?
So often it appears clumsy, I find...

I think it can be absolutely minimal. I rarely know, beyond hair colour, height and approximate build, and only the first I'd probably bother to make explicit.If you have a first-person narrator, it's not always easy to get even which gender they are soon enough not to confuse.

Through the MC's thoughts about what they're not, or how they used to be, which is always more discreet, somehow. Anything done through the eyes of the character is less likely to feel info-dumpish. Through what others say about how they do or don't look? Through them looking in a mirror and thinking? (Can be horribly clumsy, depending on their character). By who (filmstar etc.) they look like, or look the opposite? Allow yourself one physical characteristic per chapter, to avoid the dump-feeling? Take them shopping, or to the hairdresser?

Interestingly, I never described one of my MCs, as she was the narrator, and not the sort who chats to the reader, though I had a fairly clear image in my mind. When my sister read it, she said, 'And I know just what Anna looks like. Am I right?' and she was, down to her cup-size.

Emma

Thank you, Emma. That's really useful.
But it's interesting...it hadn't occurred to me that it might come down to personal taste, this business of how much detail is provided. I get the impression you're not keen on having too much, preferring to let people create their own pictures? I know what you mean, but just as with profiles of famous people, where I instinctively scan to find their age (I really can't help this! And it really bugs me when they leave it out of the piece)with novels I like some detail about what characters look like....

If I remember right, Melville, in The Confidence Man, has a comic way of describing and cancelling or erasing the description at the same time. It didn't sell too well back in the 1850s.
Joe

I think it's something you have to be quite careful about as it's so easy to do it very clumsily. You know, the sort of thing, MC stares into a mirror at his handsome face while shaving. I either don't say anything very much at all, beyond perhaps height and hair colour or use whatever method I've chosen as a plot point.

Cas

I get the impression you're not keen on having too much, preferring to let people create their own pictures?

Sometimes (not always) I think that's the key to this whole fiction malarkey. With only black marks on the paper to do it with, you can't make the reader see your picture of something. What you have to do is give the reader enough for their picture of it to be conjured up. That's what makes it feel alive to the reader - it's actually their own knowledge/experience/feeling you're kidding them into using to colour in your line drawing, and the less you learn to write to conjure up the more in their mind, the more alive it feels to them. It's particularly crucial for very non-rational, non-verbal scenes - especially sex scenes, but others too - since sex seen from outside almost always looks ludicrous. The trick is to write it so that the sex happens in the reader's head, not in front of their eyes. A big strand in my novel is about this issue of voyeurism (in the broad sense, not necessarily sexual) and what's going on when you watch someone else.

I very rarely write with an omniscient narrator: my stories are seen through one of the character's eyes, whether in first or third person. This does sort out what you should describe and what not, since it's absolutely constrained by what that character would or wouldn't notice, and how they would express it. Saves a heap of decision making (but can land you in plot trouble).

Emma

This is a controversial area. A sector of the creative writing industry seems to hold that any straightforward description of a character is unacceptable and that you must use only allusion or inference to achieve it. I don't think that any such rules are helpful. As authors we are surely communicating our picture of situations and people, and that can include their physical and behavioural description. However, overdone it can be a mistake. For instance there is a sort of convention in 19th and early 20th century Spanish literature (e.g. Blasco Ibanez and Pio Baroja) that, each time a major character appears, the reader has to deal with a page and a half of minutely detailed description. For me this has quite a negative effect.

Another point in justification of describing major and even some minor characters is that we are recording how our Main Character is viewing them. But when it comes to the MC himself/herself, I would tend, like Emma, to avoid direct description. Why? Because, generally speaking, we want the reader to be able to identify with the MC. If we are too specific as to detail, identification can be made difficult.

Here are two examples worth looking at that approach the problem from different angles.

Arnold Bennett starts 'The Card' with a 2-page background fill-in about Machin. It manages to give a very detailed picture of his history while keeping interest high. Yet he restricts the physical description to one sentence, but even this sentence is extended to cover personality as well.

He had a thick skin, and fair hair and bright eyes and broad shoulders, and the jolly gaiety of his disposition developed daily.

Thomas Mann in 'The Magic Mountain', a book which is absolutely centred on the MC throughout, avoids any direct description of Hans Castorp (whose poor state of health we are not yet aware of). This quotation is (a) a magnificent example of a description of a character (not the MC) and (b) an extremely clever way of communicating a description of the MC by explaining in this case how the MC's cousin Joachim differs from him.

And he looked sidelong at his cousin. Joachim was taller and broader than he, a picture of youthful vigour, and made for a uniform. He was of the very dark type which his blond-peopled country not seldom produces and his already nut-brown skin was tanned almost to bronze. With his large, black eyes and small, dark moustache over the full, well-shaped mouth, he would have been distinctly handsome if his ears had not stood out. Up to a certain period they had been his only trouble in life. Now, however, he had others.

Perhaps the lesson of these two is that, if one is going to give a description, it is a great idea to communicate as part of it or mixed up with it something about the character's personality or story.

Hope this is relevant.

Chris

I find it's quite a subtle process and can be as explicit as you need it to be. For example, I've experimented with using different voices, and find it quite satisfying to allow one narrator to give a contrasting description from the views of other observers in order to imply degrees of vanity or self-delusion about appearance and personality, allowing the reader to come to his/her own conclusions. This can be done by planting off-hand nuggets within the text or dialogue: my narrator might briefly discuss their hair, make-up, complexion, cultural background (eg. religious tendencies), clothes, waist size, dietary habits and other details, imparting valuable information about themselves without a direct "information dump."

Hope this helps.

A cardinal sin is to have a first person narrator stand in front of a mirror. I made this mistake but apparently get away with it as the MC is expecting his bruises and cuts after a particularly savage beating.

Another way is to get another character to say something about their appearance. Though I agree it should be minimal unless something is particulary strange i.e fantasy...

I tend to form my own impression of characters by about the first chapter. I think it's important to get a description in briefly and quickly, and usually combined with an action. It throws me out of a story when I imagine a character has dark hair and on page 120 the author tells me the MC a blond.

JB

Much as it pains me to admit this, I also did that 'mirror thing' before I realised how completely naff it was!

Thanks very much for all those comments, everyone. They have all been extremely helpful.
Great place sometimes, this website....

<Added>

JB, I didn't mean your version was naff as it quite clearly has some added value in terms of plot. Mine was, though!

No, it's ok. I only found out after I'd written it that it was non de riguer but stuff it. I like to bend the rules anyway.

JB

I'm sorry to say, both my MCs look in mirrors, but the whole novel's about reflections and photographs and glass and mirrors, and seeing yourself, and what you can't see but is there, and others seeing/drawing/photograph you etc. etc.

I know, I'm protesting too much.

Emma

Mine is about memories and the duplicity of memories, as distorted through a broken mirror of memory. There are also a lot of photography images.

JB

I've used mirrors as a metaphor too, but largely to remind the characters who they are. The reality is much less appealing than the image they portray to other characters, or more importantly to their deluded selves.

Don't know if hard and fast rules on this very useful. In my children's book I have given no physical description of my MC and very little of other kids around her - someone commented that they would have liked one - but when I thought about it, many books I read as a kid had little or no description of what people looked like - I just made up my own picture in my head. I have very clear pictures of how my characters look in terms of things like age and height relative to each other, who can do what things, who is stronger etc etc - and include things like eye colour very occasionally when it seems like something striking that my MC would notice - or things like whether someone looks like the rest of their family.

In general I wonder how much it matters what colour hair, eyes etc are? Is it really that interesting to read?

Veronica