Spoiler free

I wanted to take a moment to talk about the way I describe certain physical features of my important characters. It was something I always had a little fun with, so I’m hoping you might have some fun hearing about it.

First, I should say that I don’t go into great detail when describing my characters. Here are three reasons why:

1 – I felt like it tended to break my flow, the rhythm of the scene where I was introducing them, if I spent too much time on it. I always tried to keep it to a few sentences at most.

2 – Readers have excellent imaginations. That’s why they are there in the first place, to find something to feed that amazing engine in their minds. They are your collaborators. They’ll take your sentence (say, “A man walks into a bar”) and instinctively fill that world all by themselves. In a way I let the readers each form their own version of the character, rather than imposing every detail on them as I saw it in my head. HOWEVER, what they fill it is lifeless in comparison to what you can provide. It’s a scaffold. You can enrich their senses, give them more to breath in and forge in their minds.

With all this in mind, there are absolutely features about a character that the reader should be told, to enhance their image of them. That’s where number 3 comes in.

3 – Sometimes less is more. A few striking features that you bring up multiple times will do more to make a character memorable than a lengthy description that will only be seen once in the story. An excellent example for this is in JK Rowling’s work. Umbridge? Toad faced. Harry? Messy hair and round glasses. Snape? Oily black hair, etc… If a character is memorable for just one quality, it’s memorable enough.

Now, let me share some of the thought that went behind a couple of characters in The Nyverian Curse. They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. I showcase that. Always, the way I describe an important character’s eyes should tell the reader something about them, albeit in a symbolic sort of way.

One of the main characters, Taivas Robane, has eyes that are ‘orange like hot metal’. It’s one of my favourites. It speaks of energy, malleability, and temperament. Can you feel the heat radiating out of his eyes when he gets angry?

Let’s look at Eistas. Ah she was such a pain to choose for. God. Seriously it took a while to decide. I still hesitate. Sometimes. Anyway, her eyes are described as ‘blue-grey, like the pebbles in the river’. Eistas was living in this forest for most of her life, it seemed natural that the forest itself—in this case the pebbles in the Marble River—should be part of her very look. She’s a character with both innocence, and darkness. She’s dynamic, constantly flowing, but steady in her own way. The mixture of stone and water, and the added cute/plafulness-factor in the word ‘pebble’ and the mysterious power in the word ‘river’, shape her into a character with plenty of depth. Like a river!

I hope that my two cents on the topic was interesting, and that you’ll discover some of the thought that went into that little touch…