CWatson's Theory Rants - On First Impressions of Characters

WORKSHOP

CWATSON's THEORY RANTS - On FIRST IMPRESSIONS of CHARACTERS

Some of you faithful readers (the ones who managed to get through A Love for the Ages) are probably aware that I'm a fan of epic fantasy. I'm also a fan of science-fiction. I have already gone over my reasons for those loves in some detail. Suffice to say that, sometimes, real-life traits are easier to examine when portraited against not-real-life settings. (Actually, we knew that already. Why else does storytelling itself exist?)

I start here, with epic fantasy, because it was a book from that genre which taught me this trick.

We've all read stories, both here on this site and on others, where The Writer seeds a capsule description of the main character (particularly the female one) somewhere in the first few paragraphs of the story. Typically they go something like this:

Chelsea looked at herself in the mirror. She was proud of her slim figure, which she went to the gym three times a week to maintain. She combed a tendril of blonde hair out of her heart-shaped face, revealing her bright green eyes. She was 5'2 and 130 lbs, most of it centered in her perky 36DD breasts and 28-inch waist...

Obviously, we now know what Chelsea looks like. There's nothing wrong with that. Furthermore, the level of detail provides a second aspect of characterization: Namely, it makes the character physically attractive.

"Now hold on, Mr. Watson," I can hear you saying. "I dunno about you, but I'm actually not a fan of blondes / blue-eyed people / double-D cups / proportions that you can only find on a Barbie doll / etc." And, dear readers, that is, actually, precisely my point. When The Writer gives you this litany of traits, he is attempting to tell you, "This is what you, The Reader, should find attractive about my character." And, obviously, that doesn't always work.

These capsule portraits are boring. I mean, they're really boring. It's a litany of physical descriptors, and who cares about that?—if I want one, I'll read an anatomy textbook. So why do them? Well, it lets The Writer tell The Reader what Chelsea looks like. I mean, who wants to read about a character who is physically formless, who has no details associated with him/her? "Chelsea existed. She had a left buttock." Oh boy, my blood's stirring now. (I mean, yeah, Hemingway can do it... But most of us ain't him.)

The answer to the boredom question is obvious: cut down the description, a lot. Give the salient details (short, blonde, careful-eyed, curvy in that perfect swimsuit-model way) and let The Reader's mind fill in the rest. Personality actually dictates a lot of what The Reader will see in a physical description, so just letting the character act and interact will do a lot in that regard. But what about the second problem? How do we make our girl Chelsea attractive? Especially if we are dealing with people who prefer realistic proportions or small, pert breasts or (maybe) even a completely different ethnic group.

Here's where the fantasy novel comes in. For those who are wondering, it is The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I cannot recommend it enough. He makes my best work look like scribblings in Crayola.

For the whole lecture, skip to page 417 of the paperback and read that chapter, in which Kvothe (the main character and narrator) struggles with the very question we have been trying to answer here: how to describe a beautiful girl. He goes on at some length. But for purposes of my abridged theory-rant version, I have reproduced here (without permission) two paragraphs from page 420:

"Say this, that she was dark haired. There. It was long and straight. She was dark of eye and fair complected. There. Her face was oval, her jaw strong and delicate. Say that she was poised and graceful. There.

Kvothe took a breath before continuing. "Finally, say that she was beautiful. That is all that can be said well. That she was beautiful, through to her bones, despite any flaw or fault. She was beautiful, to Kvothe at least. At least? To Kvothe, she was most beautiful."

Obviously, that first paragraph is somewhat bare-bones. It comes after Kvothe has already waxed rhapsodic about this girl, who is very important to him—and then reneged on all of it. The framing device of The Kingkiller Chronicle is that Kvothe is essentially dictating his memoirs to a chronicler; after he has babbled on about Denna, he hits the Undo button on most of it and then gives the almost cold-hearted description seen in the first paragraph. He wants to do a good job on this description, and he admits that, like us, he doesn't know how.

But Kvothe (Mary Sue bastard that he is) immediately disproves that statement with the very next paragraph. He does know how to make The Reader attracted to Denna. After all, "To Kvothe she was most beautiful," and the way he describes her, and relates to her thereafter, proves it. Kvothe loves her. And when he describes her, he does not look at her through his eyes; he looks at her through his love.

And that's the answer.

Those of you who have been to weddings know that the most beautiful woman in the world is the one who is walking down the aisle. Every woman just gets a special glow that day, whoever she happens to be. Now keep in mind that the man who is waiting for her at the altar sees her looking like that every day of his life—because he sees her through the eyes of love, not through retinas and corneas. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

And we, as writers, can do the same in our stories.

So, do you want us to be attracted to Chelsea? Fine. Don't make her hot. Make us love her. Make us look upon her with eyes that do not see blemish or imperfection. Make us look upon her with (to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald) "an irresistable prejudice in [her] favor." Then it doesn't matter what she looks like: we like her anyway.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm halfway through The Name of the Wind and would like to get back to it, thank you...