I’ve spent most of my time during the pandemic getting my next book ready for publication. To be honest, the only thing different about this particular time of my life is my concentration isn’t worth a damn. I keep switching back and forth to the online newspapers to see what’s happening, putting my work on hold as I get lost in the confusion. I have managed to finish the book, though I’m still nitpicking it.
When our brilliant webmistress, Elle Carter Neal, put my book,
The Scent of Murder, up on the blog as a Friday Read, it got me thinking about how to describe our characters without really describing them in the usual way. Then, as I was listening to an audio in the car, another example caught my attention. That’s when I thought about how writers describe their characters. In many cases, a few words can tell the reader more than a full paragraph. Some writers like John Sandford, of the Lucas Davenport Prey series, describe what every character looks like and what he wears on the first meeting. I’ve always found that distracting. Yes, it gives the reader a picture of the character, but it stops the action, especially at the beginning of a book when it’s important to draw the reader into the story. I prefer a character’s visual image develops in the same way as his/her personality.
The example I heard in the car was from
Memory Man, the first book in the series, by David Baldacci.
“He’d pulled into the driveway of the modest two-story vinyl-sider that was twenty-five years old and would take at least that long to pay off. The rain had slicked the pavement, and as his size fourteen boots made contact, he slipped a bit before traction was gained.”
Size fourteen-size boot says it all. He’s tall, probably a big man. We know he’s a cop, but it also hints that he might have money problems. Baldacci follows it by our character describing another person in the scene as “a big burly guy, like him.” We have a picture of Amos, big, burly, with Shaquille O’Neal size feet. (Not that I would deign to critique Baldacci, but I would have written, ‘he slipped a bit before he gained traction,’ in keeping the sentence more active.)
My book
Mind Games begins when our heroine, Diana, describes what other people think of her, and she rattles off every synonym that defines a cheat. She thinks to herself:
“They were all right. She was a fraud. And a damn good one too. A thirty-three-year-old, five-foot-two bundle of fraud.”
We see Diana on stage, get a slight vision of her, know her age, but on she goes with her act without much more.
In book four, the one that Elle chose to highlight, she tells the reader who might not have read book one, more of what she looks like, and in doing so, she also describes her love-partner-in-crime, Ernie Lucier. They’re walking in New Orleans’ Jackson Square:
“Diana struggled to keep up. “Hey, put on the brakes, will ya?”
He slowed his pace. “Sorry. I forgot you take girly steps.”
She came to an abrupt stop, hands on her hips. “Wait one minute. You’re six-two; I’m a foot shorter. They’re not girly steps, they’re five-feet-two steps.”
Mirror descriptions are kind of a cop-out, but Michael Connelly does it well in the first Harry Bosch book,
The Black Echo. Harry’s also a cop.
“He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth without toothpaste: he was out and had forgotten to go by the store. He dragged a comb through his hair and stared at his red-rimmed, forty-year-old eyes, for a long moment. Then he studied the gray hairs that were steadily crowded out the brown in his curly hair. Even the mustache was going gray. He had begun to see flecks of gray in the sink when he shaved. He touched a hand to his chin but decided not to shave. He left his house then without changing even his tie. He knew his client wouldn’t mind.”
No eye color, no size or weight, no description of what he’s wearing, but we get a picture of Bosch as not only turning gray but growing old before his time. We feel his exhaustion.
I’ve used offbeat descriptions often. Here are a couple from my book,
Hooked, that the female protag uses to describe the male protag, Lincoln Walsh.
“The man might have been a New York cop, but his taste in suits was European and expensive. … To make matters worse, or maybe better, he was damn good looking. Big, brown eyes, with a face resembling those on old Roman coins. His name, Walsh, spoke of Ireland, but she’d bet there was a Mediterranean gene hidden somewhere in his DNA.” That’s the only description of him in the book, but if the reader knows anything about Roman history, she has an idea what he looks like.
In my new book, as yet unpublished, my antagonist is a man of many disguises, but without them, he’s anonymous looking. My hero is sure that when he’s not face-to-face with the man, he would be unable to describe him.
I love creative descriptions. Anyone have a great example from either your book or someone else’s?
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Polly Iyer is the author of nine novels: standalones Hooked, InSight, Murder Déjà Vu, Threads, and Indiscretion, and four books in the Diana Racine Psychic Suspense series, Mind Games, Goddess of the Moon, Backlash and The Scent of Murder. A Massachusetts native, she makes her home in the beautiful Piedmont region of South Carolina. You can visit her website for more on Polly and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.
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