Looking From the Inside Out
News Flash! February 24, 2018, 4:00 pm: Fantasy Fiction Spectacular at Page One. I’ll be signing my latest, Asphodel, along with authors Brenda Drake and Gabi Stevens. For more details go to www.page1book.com.
The last week or so, I’ve been reviewing what I have written on Wolf’s Search, the forthcoming seventh Firekeeper novel.
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What’s in a Description?
Side Note: There is no set release date for Wolf’s Search. The novel will come out when I’m finished, and it’s as good as I can make it. Because of how I write, I can’t tell you what it’s going to be about. All I can do is reassure you that this isn’t going to be one of those new novels in a series that jumps to the next generation. Okay?
One of the things I’ve been doing as I review is fill out characters’ physical descriptions.
“What?” you say “You mean you don’t work those out in advance?”
Not always. Not usually, even. Unless what a character looks like is important to some element of the plot, I often wait to get to know the characters before worrying about what they look like. Adara in Artemis Awakening and Artemis Invaded is a good example of a character whose physical description I needed to work out in advance, both because of how it would influence Griffin’s first reaction to her, then because of her unusual genetic background.
In my “Breaking the Wall” novels (beginning with Thirteen Orphans) all the main characters have at least one Chinese ancestor. How strongly the Chinese physical traits show was something I carefully worked out, basing it on how old the character was (therefore, how many generations closer to their Chinese ancestor), the ethnic background of their other forbearers, and a few other factors. Even in the same family, different combinations come out, so I had some leeway.
I know that lots of writers “cast” their characters using movie and television actors. Possibly because I don’t watch a lot of television or movies, this doesn’t work for me. The closest I come is paging through magazines, focusing especially on advertisements.
Honestly, though, I don’t think the fact that I don’t watch much in the way of movies or television is why I don’t use visual aides to design my characters. I think it’s because I write my characters from the inside out. That means how they look isn’t very important. Who they are is what is important. From there, what elements of their physical description best show who they are tend to naturally come into focus.
Firekeeper is a good example. When you think about it, she’s incredibly ordinary. Average height. Average build. Brown hair, slightly curly. Dark brown eyes. What’s interesting are the things her life has done to her, especially the scars. Her eyes draw a lot of attention, too. People tend to see them as darker than they actually are. For me, this is a result of her inhuman way of looking. Unless it’s necessary for her to focus down tightly, Firekeeper keeps a wide focus, alert as any wild animal to changes in her environment. Her body language is also subtly “wrong,” again a result of her upbringing among wolves.
In my newly-published novel, Asphodel, I took this tendency to not describe my characters to a new extreme. The narrator (I can’t give you her name without a spoiler) not only doesn’t know what she looks like, she’s afraid to find out. In Asphodel, characters change appearances repeatedly, but you – and they – always know who they are.
There are definitely times when a character’s physical appearan
ce plays into the story. Blind Seer will always be a bit of an outlier because blue eyes are rare among wolves. Sometimes a character’s physical description isn’t an issue at the time the character is introduced, but becomes so later on. Derian Carter is considered relatively ordinary in the first three Firekeeper books, but in book four (Wolf Captured), his red hair causes him to really stand out. He’s also tall and used to being so, so when he encounters people much taller than him, he’s always startled.
Remembering things like that is part of the fun. And it’s definitely one of the reasons that I enjoy writing physical descriptions after I get to know the characters, rather than in advance.
