jpskewedthrone | Interesting Questions

So, I was browsing the old LJ friendslist and

wldhrsjen3 posted the following questions:

"How much character description do you like? Do you prefer an author to keep things rather vague so you can form your own mental pictures, or do you like a clear picture of the people in the book?

And what is the best way to slip description in without interrupting the flow of dialogue or the pacing of a scene?"

I ended up leaving a rather long comment (for a comment) and I thought everyone might be interested in it. So here's my response:

OK, I generally leave the majority of the description of characters and places and whatnot up to the reader. I always find it annoying (and generally just skip ahead when reading) when a writer goes into some kind of heavy-duty description of a character in a novel. Unless something in that description is important to the plot or to the character (such as eye color because later on that's how they identify the thief, or a scar whose back story gives the character added dimension) I don't think it should be included. So I skip it. Or I give a rather vague description of the character. . . . Although now that I think about it, my "vague" descriptions are usually used to show something about the character. For example, I describe Varis at one point in The Skewed Throne, but the information I give the reader paints a picture about her world: her small form (due to starvation), her torn and tattered clothing, her matted and dirt-smeared hair. All of those details give you an idea of how she lives, but I dind't tell you about her cheek bones or the color of her eyebrows, etc. Such details didn't add anything to the story, IMO.

Others might not agree. That's just what I think about character descriptions and how I use them in a story.

No good suggestion on how to work them in. Like everything else, it should flow. I try to mix the descriptions into the other aspects of the story, such as the dialogue. You can mention how a character's long hair obscures their vision by having another character who cares for her reach out and brush the hair out of the way during a conversation. Things like that. But you can also do a more blatant description. For the above description of Varis, I actually had her think, "I don't know what he saw when he looked back--an eleven-year-old girl who looked as if she were eight, with tattered clothes, dirt-smeared skin, matted hair, cowering against the alley wall." Something like that anyway. I know that in the Throne novels, I made a conscious decision to describe things with a BAM! BAM! BAM! approach. So the basic structure was detail-detail-detail, then back to the story as quick as possible. That worked for Varis. But the new novel can't use that structure because it's got a different voice. So a single answer on how to work in the descriptions just doesn't work, because it depends on the novel and its voice.

Feel free to comment here or, better yet, over at

wldhrsjen3's original post--or both!