Friday 27 May 2011

I'd Like You to Meet...

When you are introducing a character for the first time, it's an easy pitfall to concentrate on their physical appearance at the expense of other useful information.  Indeed, physical appearance can sometimes be rather limiting: although it helps you to identify a character, to differentiate somebody with cropped dark hair from someone with a blonde bob, it doesn't tell you very much about who they are.  Even a young face has experience written into it -- it can be an irrepressible quality, or a wariness - and it is this which makes somebody interesting and helps us to remember them.

As an exercise, why don't you try describing a character, but as well as including detail about how they look try to give a sense of what it is that has shaped their appearance -- do the lines around their eyes come from laughter or disappointment, is the hardness in their face actually a form of defensiveness or is it more aggressive than that?  A catalogue of features on their own is of little interest, it is the weathering of these features which will hook your reader. Things which are hinted at or alluded to ignite curiosity in a way that information which is readily accessible does not.

It is also worth remembering that in fiction, as in the real world, appearances can be deceptive - what you see is often not what you get - so incorporating something of that notion into your work might be productive and interesting.

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