There Once Was a Girl Who Looked Like a Horse…
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During the first year of my first writing course, the Novel teacher set us students an in-class assignment to pick a fellow student, write a description of them the way we would if they were a character in our book and then read it aloud. Then everyone had to try to guess which student was being described.
There were a few rules:
*Before we started, we spent an uncomfortable and lengthy minute looking around the room, deciding who to write about and absorbing as much as possible about their appearance as we could but without staring and giving away our hand before we’d even begun writing.
*After that uncomfortable and lengthy minute, we weren’t allowed to look at the person we were writing about again during the creative process in case it ruined the guessing game we were shortly about to play.
*We couldn’t write a description that was too obvious. If there was only one boy in a blue shirt, then it wasn’t going to be much of a challenge guessing who he was.
I’m not now and wasn’t then much good at memorising faces. If I am ever asked to describe a criminal after witnessing a crime, I suspect I’m going to be very close to useless. When I do describe characters in my fiction, the details are so minimal that I mostly might as well not bother. So I made a strategic decision for this particular challenge to write about myself. If I wasn’t going to be allowed to look at anyone else in the room to refresh my poor visual memory, at least I had a pretty good idea of what I looked like. And I wouldn’t be able to break the rules by looking at myself.
I don’t remember much about my description of myself apart from a strange focus on my jagged hairline. It was probably my flaw of the month. I do, however, remember that I wasn’t the only one who chose to write about me.
Another female student whose name I don’t remember and who I couldn’t pick out of a line up if I fell over her now that it’s twenty years later (remember, bad with visual details) read her description. She had written about a long, dark ponytail that resembled a tail as it swished around. She had written about my height (taller than most other women in the course) and the proud arrogance of my posture (something I no longer have, if I ever did – I thought I was just sitting there). She had written about my nose, long and prominent. And then she drew it all together by equating my appearance with a horse. A thoroughbred, she explained. But, yes, a horse.
It wasn’t my most favourite moment ever. I don’t like being the centre of attention on any occasion, let alone one that focuses on how I look. Which is probably why I still remember it two decades after it happened. Thankfully, people don’t write about me very often anymore and never in the context of my physical attributes.
Fictional characters, of course, are far less sensitive about the way they’re described. That probably has a little to do with the fact that in popular literature most of them are supermodel beautiful and a lot to do with the fact that they aren’t real people and don’t do anything that their creators don’t let them do (fan fiction notwithstanding). Few of them look like horses. Few of them have any physical flaws at all.
Descriptions of real people are usually somewhat less flattering, often because the writer is not just capturing the essence of the person but using their personal attributes as a means of attack. Donald Trump is a prime example. While I think there are many other ways of describing him that adequately portray him without referring to his appearance, the most common are related to the colour orange – “Cheeto-dusted”, “carrot cake”, “jack-o’-lantern”, “pumpkin pie”, “Oompa Loompa”, “a rapey can of Fanta”, “a huge lobster”, “a poorly-trained circus orangutan”, “watered with irradiated bat urine”. It’s all very amusing, assuming you don’t like Trump’s politics, but it’s hardly contributing anything important. So he has a bad spray tan. So what? So have a lot of people. Half of women under the age of twenty-five in the UK have a very similar skin tone. But what is it actually adding to the debate around his performance as President of the United States?
Writers need to ask themselves the same question about any descriptions of people they write, fictional or non-fictional. If you’re going to give a fictional character a bad spray tan or point out that a real-life person has one, what is it meant to say? That you want to ridicule them? That they have self-esteem issues? Or that it’s evidence of misplaced priorities? In each case, there are probably better ways of doing it.
If it sounds like my argument is based primarily on never having gotten over being compared to a horse, it isn’t. It was a lot like the time at Year 12 camp in the meals area when the principal called for “everyone at Louise’s table” to come up. I can’t remember why we were being asked to come up; what I do remember is that the only thing I could think was, “The principal knows my name.” In a class of over three hundred people, I thought I was managing to fly under the radar. Just like I thought I was managing to fly under the radar in that Novel class. In retrospect, I can see the literary merits in her description, even if I didn’t really appreciate the attention at the time.
If your description of a person is borderline character assassination or just plain mean, you’re going to have trouble. But if you can justify it on literary merits, then you’ll probably end up okay. Because the best defence against an unhappy recipient is a brilliant piece of writing.
