Through the eyes of the blind - descriptions, five senses, and trouble therein

What I'm currently writing involves a blind person in a major role - as a POV character in the first chapter, at that.



This has been troublesome for a couple reasons.

The first immediate issue is a pretty obvious one: I need to describe things based on senses other than sight. How this blind person hears things, how she feels and smells and sometimes tastes. Give the reader a vivid impression of her surroundings with their most important sense locked away entirely.

But this isn't really a problem at all, once you think about it even a little bit more - because you're already supposed to do just that. You need to engage all the reader's senses, not just eyes and vision, in order to write vivid literature. Overdescribing the visuals while neglecting everything else is not only fighting the visual medium (movies, comic books, and such) under their terms with no hope of winning, it can also cripple the reader's imagination and make it more difficult for them to picture it in their head: you'd think that more description is good, but I think it distracts from the really important bits, and that mind yearns to be free. Let them picture it all themselves.



So it's actually not all that bad. Having a blind POV barely limits me at all, and instead makes for valuable practice in describing things and drawing the reader into it.

There's another thing, though, one I have a much more difficult time wrapping my head around: character descriptions are going to have a big hole in them.

Almost everything I've ever written has been heavily character-based. The people and the animals of the story are what the narrative follows, while the worlds and the buildings and such as just the backdrop. They always need a little bit more description than the rest, including visual detail: color of their hair and eyes, what kind of clothing they like to wear, some of the more bizarre fantasy/nonhuman details, and such. I've been chided for not doing this enough as it is - and in this particular work, this may well end up being even more glaring.

If the blind character I've been talking of were the only POV in the story, it would of course sidestep the whole thing - but she isn't. In fact, I don't know whether she'll take up the role again at all after the first chapter. And her being the POV in the first chapter is a big part of the problem: it gives an instant and vivid impression of the setting a lot of the story takes place in, but it shunts the visual characteristics of all the important actors until much later... and I can't seem to find them a place anywhere else.

They're all introduced in this first chapter, after all, and their introduction is what should immediately bring up all of this stuff. So you get to know what they sound like, how light or heavy they are based on their footsteps, bits of their personalities, and such - but very little of what they actually look like. And I don't know where to put all that stuff into, without it feeling out of place or simply being too late, messing up with the mental image the reader has by now already built to them.



Should I have them described more fully later, from the POV of another character that isn't blind? This would probably only work in introduction, the only time when he or she would truly focus on their appearance - but they were already introduced in the narrative, so doing it all over again just to establish what they look like would be a waste of everyone's time. It'd need to tell something else of them, too, that wasn't brought up in the first introduction - like one of the two characters instantly falling head-over-heels in love with the other, coloring their first interaction and making it more interesting and flavorful.

Maybe I could have their appearance change, by wearing different clothing than before, or jewelry, and then have that emphasize their looks in a new way ("The dress she wore that day went well with her red hair, blue eyes, and green skin...")? Hmm. Seems kind of tricky, especially in the context of what I already have written, but it could work.

Or I could just... you know, do what I usually do and not in fact describe the characters much if at all. Let every reader make up their own mind. But that might feel like there's nothing there, really, just a bunch of invisible blur.

Or maybe I'll spend a lot of money to commission official portraits of them all and stick those to the Internet as measuring sticks? But then what about if you never actually saw those pictures? You'd be lost at the sea!



I don't know. I'll figure something out.

Though it's nice how simply writing a blog post can help me clear out my thoughts and give me new ideas. Thanks, Goodreads.