Description of Characters in Fiction


A basic issue in fiction writing is how much physical description of a character you offer the reader. I'd like to know what you think about this.

In Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, the protagonist has had an affair (now over) with the wife of the man he visits one evening. The woman returns from her walk. We hear her footsteps as she approaches the room where the two men are talking. The protagonist, who narrates the novel in the first person, interrupts his story to tell us this about the woman he loved:

"How can I make a stranger see her as she stopped in the hall at the foot of the stairs and turned to us? I have never been able to describe even my fictitious characters except by their actions. It has always seemed to me that in a novel the reader should be allowed to imagine a character in any way he chooses: I do not want to supply him with ready-made illustrations. Now I am betrayed by my own technique, for I do not want any other woman substituted for Sarah, I want the reader to see the one broad forehead and bold mouth, the conformation of the skull, but all I can convey is an indeterminate figure turning in the dripping Macintosh, saying, 'Yes, Henry?' and then 'You?' She had always called me 'you.' 'Is that you?' on the telephone, 'Can you? Will you? Do you?' so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one 'you' in the world and that was me."

I see Greene's conflict.

What do you think? How much do you give the reader? How much is too much?

One thing to consider is that some of us are good at physical description, and some of us are not. I am not, and so I have learned not to drone on and on about the woman's red hair, white daisies, and blue stocking hat, or my reader will sink into a bog of boring details. And yet, some authors can produce such dazzling descriptive writing -- Charles Talkoff comes to mind -- that a reader can get just delightfully lost in its brilliance.

I think in the above passage Greene answers his own question. This is a woman who can make you feel as if you are the most important man in the world. She is a woman who can do this to a man. Nothing Greene could have written about her physical appearance would rivet my attention on her more intensely than the way he describes her use of the word "you" and the effect that had on the man who loved her.

With this one salient fact about the woman, I will "see" her the minute she enters the room. A woman who can make a man feel like this - I know what she looks like. Sometimes she will be an actress who is familiar to me. In this case, Audrey Tautou. But this is not a lengthy selection process on my part; the woman appears at the foot of the stairs, and then I will see her when the men do, as I think other readers will, too.

The danger a writer faces when giving too much physical description is that the reader may balk. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
Should the writer leave an enormous amount of leeway for the reader to picture the character as he wishes?

I think so. But then I fail in this over and over again, because it's so easy to fall into the traps that daisies and blue stocking hats can set for writers (and one day I realized that nearly all of the women in my stories had - dear God - red hair).

Anyway, I'd love to hear what you think about too much vs. too little in character description.



Arlene

Edited: 07/07/2008 at 12:31 PM by Arlene Sanders

I like descriptions that telegraph more to me about the character than how she looks. I want that red hair to have MEANING -- whether it's the traditional meaning of Irish temper, or something entirely different and unique to that character that's shown to me once so that it resonates every time it's mentioned thereafter. I want her to rip the petals off those daisies in fury because he loved her not, or to pick at the plastic petals that are annoyingly scratchy on the belt of the dotted-swiss Sunday dress that her mother insists she wear to Mass in summer. The blue stocking hat is so specific that there must be a REASON it's there, even if it's just to place the character in some social or economic condition that I will understand because there's a blue stocking hat.

I like the idea of spewing all those details onto the paper in my first draft, and then culling out the ones that were there to help ME see the character and leaving only the ones that let my reader see the character. It's a goal that I fail all too often to reach, though!

The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin states in Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics that:

"...Dostoevsky seeks the highest and most authoritative orientation, and he perceives it not as his own [i.e., the writer's] true thought, but as another authentic human being and his discourse....Precisely the image of a human being and his voice, a voice not the author's own, was the ultimate artistic criterion for Dostoevsky: not fidelity to his own convictions and not fidelity to convictions themselves taken abstractly, but precisely a fidelity to the authoritative image of a human being." (Quoted by Richard Pevear in his foreword to his translation of Dostoevskiy's Demons: New York, Vintage Books, 1994, p. xix.)

This passage reminds me why I didn't pursue a graduate degree in Russian literature. As dry as this quotation is in English, I promise you it's worse in Russian! But the point is solid, I think: there ought to be no set formula for how much or how little physical description one needs. There needs to be enough to establish that "authoritative image of a human being" -- and how any writer seeks fidelity to that authoritative image must be a matter of personal artistic judgement, not formula. Unless, that is, one is trying to sell romance novels. I mean, if one can't picture the bodice, it's not all that interesting to picture the bodice being ripped, right?....

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Jerri Bell
Moderator

Yes, I agree with Arlene and Jerri that there is no simple rule when it comes to the manner and degree of character description. When I hear talk about character description there are three examples that immediately come to mind:

Atwood: "His skin is pale and looks unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab."

Kesey: "...his eyes are all smoked up and gray and deserted inside like blown fuses."

O'Conner: "Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children's mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears."

To me, these examples show the power of simile to fire an image of the character in the reader's mind. I also think that conjuring similes (with some moderation of course) is one of the joys of writing. I especially like to use a quick simile when describing an otherwise unimportant walk-on character because I think the concrete image brought on by the simile enhances the Gardner vivid-and-continuous-dream thing. Again if not overdone.

Here's one of many descriptions of minor characters in a book I've just read (Soul Catcher by Michael White): "He was shorter than he appeared in the saddle, perhaps only five eight, but broad shouldered and thick through the middle. Not fat, but solid and imposing in the manner of a well-fed Angus bull."

That's minor characters. Okay, now I'm going to say something that some of you may disagree with. When it comes to a protagonist talking about a character (as in Arlene's example), say, a love of his or hers, be it a long-lost, unrequited, or whatever love, I don't think much needs to be done in the way of describing that character. Why? Because if the reader has lived at all, he or she will already have a warm and fuzzy image of such a character in their mind. The image and attendant emotion may be of a person the reader has known, or would have wanted to know, and it's already there in the reader's mind so why take a chance and mess with it with a police-blotter description of the character (unless you're doing that for effect).

I agree that we don't really need to describe our characters and something such as looking in the mirror (as we've all probably heard) is one of the no,no's that editors talk about (along with starting a story with someone waking up with the alarm clock! Gee, I wish someone had told me that one before I sent this one story to a certain editor!) Reediting (once again reediting one of my old books for someone) I did have a minor character talking over the head of my lead and a few other such things. But I do follow our teacher's comments about leaving out anything that stops the flow of the narrative and I imagine that most descriptions of characters do that as well as lengthy descriptions of scenery that don't set the mood or foreshadow and all. Lately, I keep remembering things Alice McDermott said and my writing keeps getting simpler in a way and more complex at the same time! I think it's because of making everything work as Jim said. M

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marystojak

Hi, Guys. I've enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts and/or quotations on character description. I agree that to some extent, what works or what doesn't work depends on the skill and talent of the writer. As far as the Greene example, let's not forget the excerpt Arlene provided has more to do with revealing Bendrix as character than Green as writer. In other words, I think the way Bendrix agonizes over how to describe Sarah, and what he chooses to say or not say about her is what's important here because Greene is revealing Bendrix' character. How Sarah actually looks seems to me to be secondary. What do other people think? In thinking about description, I'd also like to echo what Mary S. wrote about keeping it simple. In Chekhov's "The Lady with the Lapdog," the woman whom Gurov encounters at the beginning of the story is "fair and not very tall; after her trotted a white Pomeranian." While this is a relatively simple description, it speaks volumes when you think about how the story ends. This lady appears to be just another easy conquest for Gurov, but by the end of the story, he becomes her lapdog. So simple a description, and yet everything Chekhov includes is there for a reason. I agree, Mary, that simple can actually be filled with complexity. Thanks for listening. Mary Eck

Hi, Guys. I've enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts and/or quotations on character description. I agree that to some extent, what works or what doesn't work depends on the skill and talent of the writer. As far as the Greene example, let's not forget the excerpt Arlene provided has more to do with revealing Bendrix as character than Green as writer. In other words, I think the way Bendrix agonizes over how to describe Sarah, and what he chooses to say or not say about her is what's important here because Greene is revealing Bendrix' character. How Sarah actually looks seems to me to be secondary. What do other people think? In thinking about description, I'd also like to echo what Mary S. wrote about keeping it simple. In Chekhov's "The Lady with the Lapdog," the woman whom Gurov encounters at the beginning of the story is "fair and not very tall; after her trotted a white Pomeranian." While this is a relatively simple description, it speaks volumes when you think about how the story ends. This lady appears to be just another easy conquest for Gurov, but by the end of the story, he becomes her lapdog. So simple a description, and yet everything Chekhov includes is there for a reason. I agree, Mary, that simple can actually be filled with complexity. Thanks for listening. Mary Eck

Interesting thoughts! I have been thinking about what I wrote and thinking - well that's true sometimes. Each piece probably deserves to be evaluated on its own I imagine. Amid all the hoopla this weekend - I don't know why I am so busy this summer, usually like to kick back a bit - I read Heart of Darkness again. That was one of my favorite books in high school and this was the first time that I've picked it up since then. Of course, this is an older book, but I love his description of the characters in the beginning and all that those descriptions implies. If I can swing the "simple" in any case, I'll consider that an achievement. The Other Mary

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marystojak

Edited: 07/21/2008 at 01:04 PM by Mary Stojak