First-person Intimate

These instructive thoughts from Colm Toibin, in his New York Times Magazine (5/3/09) profile. The author of The Blackwater Lightship (one of my favorite books) and, newly, Brooklyn (on my list) avoids, he says, describing his protagonists, and this is why: "If you describe them physically, you actually remove them from the reader, you distance them. By not describing them, you begin to make their perception so intimately involved with the reader's perceptions that it allows the reader to ente