Where Am I? And What Do You Look Like?

Does your protagonist have blonde, black, red, or brown hair? Is he/she tall or short, fat or skinny, pimply or clear skinned? What a plethora of choices: athletic, sickly, handicapped, bull-headed, clumsy, elegant—oh the possibilities! How does an author choose?

Varied genres handle the task of portraying characters in differing ways. Chick lit is big on meticulous description—right down to depicting outfits and shoes and hairstyles and the like. I don’t read YA, but imagine description must play an important role, as adolescents and teenagers tend to be obsessed with appearance. When it comes to more literary fare, some schools of thought recommend a light-handed approach when it comes to portraying the main character. Don’t bog the reader down with limitations, they say, let the mind's eye supply necessary details. Save in-depth depictions for villains or secondary characters. Do you follow these rules? Or are rules meant to be broken?

And then there’s the setting, or settings. You’ve got the country, the city, the suburbs, uptown, downtown, under the bridge, skyscraper penthouses, tenements, golf course condos, farmhouses. Are we in a foreign country, local, staying put, or on the road? Don’t start off in one locale and then halfway through the book switch gears—that’s a big no, no. If we’re on the move, make that clear from the beginning, or end the book with a change of scene. Don’t confuse the reader. Change of scene must be intricately tied to the story, don’t put your protagonist on the move for no good reason. More rules. More to think about.

Below are some fine examples of description by authors one can only hope to aspire to one day.

John Irving describes Garp's mother in The World According To Garp:

Jenny was twenty-two. She had dropped out of college almost as soon as she'd begun, but she had finished her nursing-school program at the head of her class and she enjoyed being a nurse. She was an athletic-looking young woman who always had high color in her cheeks; she had dark, glossy hair and what her mother called a mannish way of walking (she swung her arms), and her rump and hips were so slender and hard that, from behind, she resembled a young boy. In Jenny's opinion, her breasts were too large; she thought the ostentation of her bust made her look "cheap and easy."

And, can you imagine putting the reader into a mind of a dog while also preparing the reader for the far north setting of the story with any better skill than Jack London displays in The Call of the Wild? I sure can't.

Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide- water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.

One of my favorite authors of all time, Anne Tyler, sets the scene in the main character's family home in The Accidental Tourist, with a light touch, yet establishing a strong sense of purpose.

When his brothers came home from work, the house took on a relaxed, relieved atmosphere. Rose drew the living room curtains and lit a few soft lamps. Charles and Porter changed into sweaters. Macon started mixing his special salad dressing. He believed that if you pulverized the spices first with a marble mortar and pestle, it made all the difference. The others agreed that no one else's dressing tasted as good as Macon's. "Since you've been gone," Charles told him, "we've had to buy that bottled stuff from the grocery store." He made it sound as if Macon had been gone a few weeks or so - as if his entire marriage had been just a brief trip elsewhere.

Here's the great Willa Cather's opening for O Pioneers. Places you right smack dab down in Nebraska.

One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain "elevator" at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office. The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o'clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The children were all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a few rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their long caps pulled down to their noses. Some of them had brought their wives to town, and now and then a red or a plaid shawl flashed out of one store into the shelter of another. At the hitch-bars along the street a few heavy work-horses, harnessed to farm wagons, shivered under their blankets. About the station everything was quiet, for there would not be another train in until night.

I'd love to hear what descriptions in fiction you find most memorable or totally blew you away.

All Rights Reserved. © 2009 by Elizabeth Bradley.