I am trying to finally pull myself out of the new job daze (given that I’ve been in my “new” job for nearly a year, so it’s not actually “new” any longer) and write more. I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year, but I am excited to get back to writing fiction. The most exciting thing about doing NaNo last year was that writing fiction was a lot easier and more fun than I thought it would be.
One aspect of writing fiction that I did struggle with was physical descriptions of my characters. I realized that most books provide a description of what characters look like, and that I had no interest at all in doing the same.
I don’t create pictures of characters in my head when I read. I assume this is because I am (self-diagnosed) moderately face blind. In my most beloved book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, I have no sense of what the main character looks like. I have a feeling of who he is, but when I read the book, I picture Muchings End and Tossie’s dresses and the bishop’s bird stump and Coventry Cathedral on fire, but I never picture any of the faces of any of the characters.
(I can’t hold a clear mental picture of anyone’s face in my mind, including my own face or the faces of my closest family members and friends. I didn’t think this was out of the ordinary until a few years ago, when I realized that other people can easily remember what people’s faces look like.)
Would Harry Potter be Harry Potter without the messy black hair and green eyes and lightning-bolt scar? Of course not. However, when I think of Katniss from The Hunger Games, I didn’t realize that I had no clue what she looked like until I heard people complaining that Jennifer Lawrence wasn’t olive-skinned with dark hair. I think of Jessica Darling, from another of my favorite series of YA books, and I have no clue what she looks like.
Is a physical description of a character important to you when you’re reading?
I very rarely use a description of a character to create an image of them in my mind. It is only books that I have read multiple times that I find myself creating a mental image of. I think this is due to the fact I read so fast. I am often not reading a book long enough to become attached to the character enough to think about what they look like.
A very belated and long reply to this interesting post of yours!
I only experience the phenomenon of needing to picture fictional characters with real faces and other features in young adult books, because so many YA authors make a huge deal about so-and-so’s brilliant red hair or steely silver eyes, ahem. Also, somehow I got through the first couple of Harry Potter books completely missing the fact that Draco was blond – I had imagined him with dark hair like Harry, and initially I was annoyed to realize my mind’s eye version of him wasn’t correct (because yes, clearly Draco’s hair color is absolutely integral to who he is as a fictional character.
) So I think that that experience helped me pay closer attention to the many instances of characters’ physical descriptions in books (but really, in YA it’s not that hard because the authors usually hit the readers over the head with each one.)
Here are the characters for which my mind’s eye image of them is very important, in the sense that I’ve tried to imagine them and, in the latter two cases, failed to get a clear image in spite of everything provided by the authors:
Meg and Calvin from A Wrinkle in Time. This is probably because Meg has brown hair, brown eyes and glasses like me, but it’s also because I have that edition with those wonderful drawings of them and young Charles Wallace on the cover, and man if that drawing of Calvin didn’t fill me with adolescent lust for years to come! My exact picture of them is VERY important, but it’s all because of the cover artist who did such a perfect job! Who wouldn’t want to imagine Meg and Calvin looking as perfect as that? I want that artist to draw all my favorite characters for me, mmmmm….
Next: Bran from The Dark is Rising sequence. He’s the son of King Arthur and Guinevere, and Susan Cooper describes him as having longish white-blond hair (he’s albino, although I can’t recall if she actually uses that word in the book – she might just say his skin is translucent and he’s otherwise totally devoid of color, etc etc) – plus, he has “tawny owl-eyes” that are different shades of gold. I almost have a clear image of him in my head but not quite, and in this case I wish my image was clearer – I so wish I definitively “knew” what he looks like!
And, lastly: Remus from The Shoebox Project. Because even though the authors/illustrators drew all kinds of pictures of all four Marauders from countless angles, I feel like every drawing of Remus is different from the next, to the point that none of them seem to look like the same person to me. I don’t feel that way at all about the other three, though. (Well, I sort of felt that way about their Sirius, until I got to a certain drawing that quickly became my favorite and I decided that was the one portraying what he *really* looked like. (It’s the one the four of them plus Lily in the middle, with Sirius and Remus looking at each other from either end of the photo.)