The Unclear Character

Last time we discussed “the un-set scene”—when a scene is unclear because the author has failed to establish a minimum level of basic details about the setting. Today, we’ll cover a similar problem that can arise with characters: “the unclear character.”

Not all characters will require the same amount of description—sometimes a very basic, even vague, description will suffice, while other times a more thorough amount of detail will be necessary. Tolkien described most of his characters, such as Gandalf and the hobbits, with great precision. Dan Wells, on the other hand, has pointed out that he wrote several books starring his character John Wayne Cleaver without ever telling us what color John’s hair was.

An excellent example of these opposing situations can be found in Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. Her descriptions of her male lead and love interest, Edward, are extremely detailed, which is appropriate in a romance novel aimed at teenage girls. Her descriptions of her protagonist Bella, on the other hand, are generally vague; this allows readers to picture the details of Bella’s appearance however they like, which in turn allows Bella to serve as an audience self-insertion avatar, increasing readers’ involvement in the story and romance.

No matter how much or how little you choose to describe your characters, there are a few basic details that your audience will need to clearly picture your narrative:

Pictured: characters without these basic,
distinguishing characteristics.

Gender: Gender is one of the most basic elements that people use to categorize one another. Whether the gender of your characters is male, female, or something else, it will be helpful to your audience if they know where your characters fit along that spectrum. You don’t want your audience to be picturing a character of one gender only to discover later that they were completely wrong.

Age: Not everyone acts their age. Some children are unusually mature, while a disturbing amount of adults never quite seem to grow out teenage behavior. This is part of the reason that it is important to make clear what the ages of your characters are early on. I’ve read many stories where the protagonist’s behavior led me to believe that they were a child, only for me to discover later that they were supposed to be an adult.

Unusual aspects of appearance: I once read a story written in third-person limited perspective from the point of view of an old man. It was four pages before the author mentioned, out of nowhere, that the old man had a peg leg. That’s the sort of thing that would be a large part of a person’s life, don’t you think? It’s the sort of thing that should be apparent from very early on in the story. Don’t drop major details about a character’s appearance late in the story.

Species: This is basically the same as "unusual aspects of appearance," but it's worthy of extra note. If a character is not a human being, you should generally make that clear up front.

That’s pretty much it. You can give more detail, of course (and usually you should), but you shouldn’t generally give less than this.

Note: These rules apply particularly to perspective characters. If we’re in a character’s head, we should know what they know, including details about themselves. If you want to hide details about a non-perspective character for later on, however, you can usually do so. 

Perspective Errors: Over-Writing Action

Several types of perspective place you inside the head of the protagonist: third-person limited perspective and first-person present-tense perspective both embrace the concept that you are being shown the story in the moment that it happens through the lens of the perspective character. Third-person omniscient and first-person past-tense perspective also sometimes relay the narrative in this manner—through the eyes of a character as it is happening.

We’ve discussed before the importance of describing scenes, action, and other characters in a way that is appropriate for the perspective from which you’re writing. For example, an illiterate thug who grew up on the streets probably wouldn’t describe his perceptive friend as “perspicacious,” even in his own head. He might not even use the word “perceptive,” for that matter. So if you’re in the thug’s head, you shouldn’t describe his friend that way. It doesn’t matter if you, the author, would describe someone as perspicacious; you’re trying to place your audience in the mind of the perspective character, and using out-of-place language breaks the illusion.

Now, the way you describe action and the world of your story should also be influenced by any temporary conditions that your perspective character is under. A blindfolded character could not describe her surroundings visually, and so she would have to focus more on sounds, smells, and other senses that she normally would. A character who has taken a blow to the head might be dizzy or have trouble thinking clearly, and the language you use while they are in that state should reflect that.

One such state that frequently arises but often does not affect the prose of new writers is action. A character in a high-adrenaline situation, where they are perhaps fighting for their life, should not usually perceive their surroundings and their actions in the same way that they would in a calmer situation. Here’s a few things to look out for when writing actions scenes from the perspective of your character:

Match your description to your time

     Jenna moved forward slowly, careful to place her feet gently to avoid making any sound. Between each step, she peered through the trees, checking the darkness between the trees for the source of the noises she had heard. She held her rifle ready—the noises couldn’t have been made by anything smaller than a person.

     A black shadow suddenly loomed above the foliage ahead of her. The moment she noticed it, the creature—an enormous, scarred black Jinduan bear—charged with a deafening roar. Behind it, three small cubs growled, watching Jenna curiously.

White oak branches cracked and shattered out of the bear’s path, and Jenna only caught a glimpse of gleaming yellow irises and massive white canines before she was knocked to the ground by a heavy paw with muddy, five-inch claws. She attempted to raise her rifle, but there wasn’t enough room.

Most action happens quickly. In this example, the bear charged so quickly that Jenna was unable to shoot it, even though she explicitly had her rifle ready. And yet, in that time, she was able to discern what type of bear this was, that it was scarred, how many cubs the creature had, what they were doing, and what type of branches the bear was charging through. Doesn’t that seem a little unrealistic? Even if Jenna might have been vaguely, peripherally aware of these details, they probably wouldn’t have been occupying her attention in the moment that the angry bear was charging her!  Limit your description to fit the focus and observational capabilities of your character in the moment that events are happening.

In action, simple words can trump more complicated or specific words

I’ve posted several times about the need to use more specific, evocative words in description. In action, however, this rule doesn’t always apply. When adrenaline is pumping and action is happening quicker than rational thought, your prose can reflect your character’s inability to think quickly enough to keep up with the action.

For example, in our example above—if an enormous bear was charging you and you caught a brief glimpse of its face just before it attempted to ruthlessly, messily kill you, do you think your mind would be going, “Hmm, look at those gleaming yellow irises and massive white canines. Oh, and what heavy paws with muddy claws. Why, I do believe that those claws are approximately five inches long. My, my.” Of course you wouldn’t be thinking that! Unless you are the most hardened, constantly-in-peril protagonist in all of history, you would probably be thinking, “TEETH!! SCARY EYES!! HOLY @#!% THOSE @!&#ING CLAWS ARE HUGE!! I’M GOING TO DIE!!!

Now, you don’t need to reduce your narrative to nigh-incoherent screaming, and I certainly hope that you would avoid such horrible over-use of capital letters. But you should probably try to find a good middle ground. If your normally-well-spoken protagonist suddenly drops all of her eloquence in the middle of an action scene, it could be a useful and effective way to convey unthinking fear or urgency. Even if your character keeps their head, they should probably be too busy fighting for survival to consider the specifics of every detail.

Mordu, did you know that one of your incisors is broken? Oh, sorry, we're busy, aren't we? This probably isn't the best time.

Shorter sentences are preferable to longer sentences

This is an oft-repeated bit of advice for action scenes, but it is oft-repeated because it is good advice. Short sentences serve the same purpose as simple words—they convey that events are happening quickly, that the character doesn’t have time to think, that her mental state has been reduced to a more basic, primal, survival instinct.

Now, your action scenes shouldn’t consist of nothing but sentence fragments—in fact, many of your sentences may still turn out pretty long. But you should avoid more complicated sentences. If you’re busting out semicolons, colons, or too many em dashes, you’re probably decreasing the tension of your action scene. Your character is having to react too quickly for them to think much, and you want your readers to feel that. But if they have to slow down to decipher or consider complicated sentence construction, that won’t happen.

Perspective Errors: Name Placeholders

We’ve previously discussed how to use synonyms to avoid frequent repetition of a single word and the needfor description to remain true to the mindset of the perspective character. Today, we’ll discuss a point at which these two topics intersect.

I mentioned in this post that it is a common and useful practice to refer to a character by a short descriptor in order to avoid repeating their name too often. If you wrote a scene where a detective was interviewing a butcher named Mr. Giacomo, for instance, you might alternately refer to Mr. Giacomo as “the butcher,” “the witness,” or even simply “the man”:

     “What did the assailant look like?” Detective Mullens asked.

     “Well, he was short,” Mr. Giacomo replied. He held out his hand at about the height of his shoulder. “Maybe this tall. He was dressed in black.” The man shrugged. “That was all I could make out.”

However, a problem can arise when referring to characters by these sort of placeholders.

     Piotr did his best not to cry as his mother pulled him into the closet and shut the door behind them. She sat on the floor and pulled him into her lap, stroking his hair.

     “Shhh, you need to be quiet now,” his mother whispered. “We have to stay hidden, all right?”

     Piotr nodded and bit his lip, throwing his arms around his mother’s neck. He was still sniffling, but he held in the tears.

     There was a crash in the room outside. Piotr almost cried out, but his mother hugged him tight against her. He could feel that the woman was holding her breath, and so he did the same, trying to be absolutely silent. They sat in silence, trembling, as the men ransacked the bedroom outside.

The problem in this passage is a small but pervasively common one—it’s the point where Piotr’s mother is referred to as “the woman.”

In this post, we discussed the need for description to match the perspective of the character. In the example above, Piotr is our perspective character. How many children do you know that would ever refer to their mother as “the woman”? While his mother is, of course, a woman, for him to think of her by that term feels very distant and cold. It feels out of character.

"I love my mother, but the woman wouldn't let me have ice cream for dessert."
See how off that feels? This kid is either a brat or not being written well.

It wasn’t a problem for Detective Mullens to think of Mr. Giacomo as “the man” because the two of them barely knew each other—their relationship is not at all close or caring.  But Piotr and his mother are too close for that.

This problem sometimes arises in the works of authors for whom English is a second language. In many other languages, referring to someone as “man” or “woman” is normal and carries no connotation of emotional distance. In English, however, it does; so watch out for this.

If you use a name placeholder, make sure that it is a word that fits the relationship between the character and the perspective character.

Making Movement Meaningful

Pure dialog can get confusing and even boring; it can also fail to convey the many subtleties that people communicate through means like expression and body language. This is the reason that writers often insert small actions into passages of dialog. The actions could be changes in a character’s expression, small movements or gestures, or specific tasks that the character is performing while they talk. For example:

     “I don’t think we should go after her,” Sofia whispered. She shifted in her seat and closed her eyes with a sigh.

     Matilde glanced at Sofia and then looked away. “Why not?”

    “She decided to leave all on her own. No one made her.” Sofia shook her head and bit her lip. “She obviously doesn’t want to be here.”

     “Maybe . . .” Matilde replied, looking down at her feet while she shuffled them back and forth. “But what happens when she decides she wants to be here after all and it’s too late for her to come back? Chiara tends to be pretty impulsive.”

     Sofia stuck out her tongue. “We still can’t force her to do what she doesn’t want to,” she said, waving her hands.

     Matilde looked up with a frown and then turned away again, wringing her hands. “We could. And maybe we should.”

Now, that passage was packed a little too full of actions—every single line of dialog was accompanied by at least one action. That’s partly because I wanted to fit as many examples as I could into one passage, but many people do write their conversation scenes this way.  But why is that too many actions? Am I saying that you should never have an action to accompany every line of dialog? No. The problem isn’t the number of actions so much as it is the lack of purpose behind so many of the actions.

Let’s list the actions from the passage again:

     shifted in her seat

     closed her eyes

     with a sigh

     glanced at Sofia

     and then looked away

     shook her head

     and bit her lip

     looking down at her feet

     shuffled [her feet] back and forth

     stuck out her tongue

     waving her hands

     looked up with a frown

     and then turned away again

     wringing her hands

What are each of these actions supposed to convey? Why is the character performing that particular action at that point in the conversation?  With some of these actions, the purpose is pretty clear. When someone closes their eyes and sighs, for instance, it’s usually a pretty good indication of weariness or irritation. Hand wringing and lip biting are decent ways to indicate nervousness or internal confliction. And frowns are pretty clear indications of unhappiness or severe confusion.

But even those examples could each have more than one meaning. As for the others, they don’t convey anything meaningful. What is the audience supposed to learn from the fact that Sofia “shifted in her seat”? Is the seat uncomfortable? Is she emotionally uncomfortable and the movement is a physical indication of that fact? Was she trying to relax or get a better view of something? There are so many reasons to shift in one’s seat that simply describing the action carries next to no meaning.

Why is it significant that Matilde looked at Sofia and then looked away? What does that mean? What does it mean that she’s looking down at her feet while shuffling them? Is her turning away after looking up with a frown supposed to tell us something about her thoughts? Because it isn’t. It might be vaguely sort-of hinting at some sort of emotional state, but it sure isn’t informing the audience of anything.

Even Sofia sticking out her tongue is confusing. There are so many ways and reasons that people stick out their tongues:

Each of these images conveys a different emotion, and yet they could all be described as someone “sticking out his or her tongue.” From the context, we could probably narrow down Sofia’s gesture to two or three of these, but it still wouldn’t be clear. Is she disgusted? Petulant? Nauseated? We just don’t know.  Remember—most expressions and movements can indicate more than one emotion, thought, or state of mind. Just because you know which meaning you were trying to convey doesn’t mean that your readers will get it.

“Looks” are probably the worst category of offenders on this front. Throughout the conversations I read, characters are “looking” all over the place. They look at one another, they look at their feet, at the wall, at the table, into the distance, into the sky, at their hands, at their clothes. And most of it doesn’t have any meaning whatsoever. Beware the meaningless look!

This usually happens when a writer can tell that the conversation needs a beat or a brief lull to break up the dialog, but they don’t have anything for the characters to do to provide that break. If you need a beat but you can’t think of a meaningful movement or expression for your character, then give them something to do! In our example above, Sofia could have been trying to finish some (plot-related) paperwork while they conversed or Matilde could have already begun packing to go after Chiara. The possibilities are endless.

Give your manuscript to a friend and ask them to highlight any point where the purpose of movements or expressions was unclear or confusing. If you can’t come up with a meaningful movement to replace the vague one, then don’t be afraid to cut it out entirely.

Perspective Errors: Matching Description and Viewpoint

One of the most important aspects of writing is getting out of your own head and into the heads of your perspective characters. Some characters might be quite a lot like you, but many of them will view the world much differently—and it’s important that you keep your perspective (or the perspective of other characters) from bleeding into the heads of your protagonists, especially when you’re describing the world around them.

In this post, we discussed one way that such perspective bleed can happen—when an author is an expert on a certain topic, it can pop up in their writing even when it shouldn’t. For instance, I’m pretty well-trained in English grammar and editing. If I were writing from the point of view of a well-educated librarian, I might have her note that the text on a sign misused a present-continuous participle and left a modifier dangling. However, if I were writing from the perspective of a largely-illiterate street thug walking past the same sign, describing the sentence using those detailed terms would be completely out of place.

This problem—describing things in ways your perspective character wouldn’t—is probably most common when a perspective character is of a different nationality, race, or gender from the author. For instance, here is the single most common and jarring example that I have come across (and I have come across versions of it many, many times):

     Diana frowned at Detective Mullens. “My husband didn’t keep secrets from me, detective. If he had been involved in something illegal, he would have told me.”

     Detective Mullens raised his hands in a placating manner. “I’m not trying to cast aspersions on your husband, ma’am. I just have to follow every lead and possibility I come across. Do you recognize these ledgers?”

     The detective handed her a three-ring binder. She did recognize it—it held their family finances. It usually sat on a shelf in her and her husband’s bedroom. She hadn’t even realized it was missing. “Where did you find this?” she asked.

     Before the detective could answer, the front door opened and Diana’s twenty-three year old daughter Stefanie walked in. She’d clearly been jogging—her bronze skin was glistening with sweat, her body firm and lean but still curvy. Her dark hair was pulled up in a simple ponytail, though a few strands had fallen loose to dangle in front of her vivid brown eyes and her full, red lips. Her ample breasts were outlined clearly through the tight sports bra she wore, moving up and down as her heavy breathing slowed to normal. She bent down almost sensuously to brush some dirt from her tight red leggings, and Diana frowned when she noticed that Detective Mullens was watching appreciatively.

     Diana cleared her throat, and Stefanie looked up in surprise. “Oh, hi,” she said. “I didn’t see you there. What’s going on?”

Now, I sincerely hope that you all can see the problem in this passage. We’re in Diana’s head—that’s clear from the fact that we’ve been given her thoughts and no one else’s. Therefore, everything we see should come through the filter of Diana’s mind. Everything should be described as she would describe it—and if that is how she would describe her own daughter, there’s something seriously wrong with this family.

These particular scenes usually happen for one of two reasons. First, the (probably male) author is describing the daughter as he, the author, pictures her without any regard to viewpoint. This is poor writing—if your viewpoint doesn’t allow you to describe something in the way you’d like, either change your viewpoint to one compatible with your description or change your description to one compatible with the viewpoint.

The second possibility is that the author wants to convey how Detective Mullens sees Stefanie, because he’s the actual protagonist and we’ve only temporarily leapt to Diana’s perspective. If that’s the case, then why are we in Diana’s perspective? Very few stories are well served by multiple viewpoints—you might as well keep the point of view with Detective Mullens.

(By the way, this particular problem—sexualizing a character while in the viewpoint of a character who wouldn’t sexualize them—is much more common from male authors than female writers. But female writers are definitely not immune to this error, so be on guard!)

These two people should not describe things in the same way. Don't describe what he sees in a way she would describe it, or vice versa.

Always remember that description should match the perspective of the character—don’t let your personal viewpoint or the view of a non-viewpoint character influence description, unless you want to make some unfortunate implications about the perspective character!

For more on this topic, check out this post.

Description and Degrees of Familiarity, Part Two

In the last post, we discussed how detailed description can be used to demonstrate that a character is unfamiliar with an object; we also covered how to describe objects that are unfamiliar to the reader but familiar to the character. Today, we’ll discuss two other reasons to dwell longer on description than you otherwise might.

When the character is intensely familiar with a type of object

Compare these three examples:

     Xin looked out the window. There was a red car parked outside; she couldn’t see the driver. Strangely, a bone-mouth Shar-pei sat on the hood of the car, watching her window. Its fur was a deep blue-black, and it was taller than any other Shar-pei she’d ever seen, maybe as tall as seventy centimeters. Its ears and tail were also usually long; it couldn’t have been a pure-bred.

     The dog barked suddenly, and the door of the car opened. A pale man in a dark suit and sunglasses climbed out, turning his gaze on her window. Xin ducked out of sight.

     Xin looked out the window. There was a red car parked outside; she couldn’t see the driver. Strangely, a black dog sat on the hood of the car, watching her window. It barked.

     The door of the car opened, and a pale man climbed out. He wore a black silk tangzhuang coat with gold snakes embroidered along the cuffs up to the elbows and around the stiff collar. His eyes were hidden by a pair of dark metal-framed sunglasses; Xin couldn’t see what brand they were from here, but she could tell they were expensive—not the cheap knock-offs most people bought on the street. The man turned his gaze on her window, and she ducked out of sight.

     Xin looked out the window. A red Lamborghini was parked outside, a Gallardo LP 550 that looked like its suspension system had been upgraded. A pair of holes on the rear of the car indicated that the car had once had a heavy spoiler attached; based on the marred paint, it had been torn free violently.

     Strangely, a black dog sat on the hood of the Lamborghini, watching her window. It barked, and the door of the car opened. A pale man in a dark suit and sunglasses climbed out, turning his gaze on her window. Xin ducked out of sight.

Sorry, you'll have to settle for just the car. Can you believe that I couldn't find a single image of a red Lamborhini Gallardo LP 550 parked on the side of a Chinese street with a black bone-mouth Shar-pei sitting on top and a driver in a gold-embroidered black tangzhuang and dark sunglasses? The internet has failed me. 

In each of these examples, Xin is a slightly different person, isn’t she? The first Xin clearly knows a thing or two about dogs, the second has a trained eye for clothing, while the last really knows her way around a car. And yet the only thing that changed was what object in the scene the writer chose to describe in greater detail. A person who is an expert in something—be it cars, dogs, clothing, guns, spaceships, a certain culture, or whatever—will discuss and observe that thing with a level of specificity that someone who is unfamiliar with the topic cannot.

Here’s a few things to keep in mind when showing familiarity through description:

Use specific terms. The first major difference between unfamiliar description and expert description is terminology. Someone who is completely unfamiliar with cars would describe one in very basic terms—large, loud, wheeled, shiny, fast, and so on. Someone who is an expert on cars will have a command of specific terms gained through years of study and osmosis—brand names, car models, engine types, and so on.

Make comparisons. The second major difference between unfamiliar description and expert description is that someone who is an expert on a type of object has a vast mental catalog of similar objects to which they can compare the one you’re describing. For instance, when our first Xin was describing the dog, she immediately noted the ways that this Shar-pei was different from others and concluded that it wasn’t pure-bred.

Keep it understandable to the reader. Using extremely specific terms can often be confusing to the reader. For instance, how many of you know what a “bone-mouth” Shar-pei is? I didn’t, before I wrote that example. I certainly couldn’t have identified a Lamborghini Gallardo LP 550 from any other Lamborghini, either. These specific terms add to the sense that the character knows what she’s talking about, but they don’t necessarily help the reader picture the object. You need to strike a balance between specific, in-depth terms and description that will be useful to the reader. For instance, the tangzhuang coat from the second example. Technically, the word “coat” is redundant—a tangzhuang is a style of coat and wouldn’t refer to a different style of clothing—but I included the word to help readers better picture the clothing. I also used the description of the embroidery to sneak in the fact that the coat had long sleeves and a stiff collar, so that the readers could get an idea of what a tangzhuang looked like without my needing to break perspective.

Don’t let the description get out of control. Xin number three was familiar with cars, so it was natural for her to notice several details about the Lamborghini but few about the dog or the man. However, it would be very easy for that level of familiarity to swell to unnatural levels. For instance:

     “When was the last time you saw Li?” the man asked.

     Xin thought for a moment. She couldn’t remember seeing Li since she’d dropped him off at work the day before in her 2013 Volkswagen Santana.

That was a little ridiculous, don’t you agree? The line should have simply ended after the word before. “She couldn’t remember seeing Li since she’d dropped him off at work the day before.” Just because a character is familiar with something doesn’t mean you need to shoehorn that familiarity in at every opportunity. Keep it real.

This is particularly common when the character’s familiarity with a certain type of object is one that the author shares. An author who is an expert on horses, for instance, might want to show that off at every opportunity in a story. Tone it back—give the readers enough to realize that the character (and by extension, you) knows what she’s talking about. Don’t shove it down their throats.

Another version of this problem is when every single character is inexplicably familiar with something that the author knows well. It’s fine to have a lot of characters who can identify a hint of saffron or rosemary from just a whiff of the dinner they’re about to eat, but not every character should be able to. To some people, it will just be a nice-smelling dinner.

When you just want to describe something

Our final reason for including in-depth description for something is the simplest, but the easiest to let get out of control: you just want to. Maybe you have a really vivid image of what a certain boat looks like, or you really feel like dwelling on the battered-up appearance of a character’s trenchcoat. Sometimes, you’ll just want to describe something. And that’s fine—go for it. Just be sure to follow the advice from this post; write the description, ask a lot of people to read it and tell you if it’s too much, and then pare it back if most of them say it is. And sometimes, if you really love that description, well . . . you’ll just have to hope you can find an editor who loves it as much as you do. Good luck!