EYES THE COLOR OF SLUSH

What a short month, and it’s not February! Here is today’s post:

_____

Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively by Rebecca McClanahan, Writer’s Digest Books, 1999

Chapter 6: Bringing Characters to Life Through Description (Part 1)

“When Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim was asked about his creative process, he replied, ‘If you told me to write a love song tonight, I’d have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that’s a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.’”

If you try to write about an abstraction like grief or love, you must first pay attention to the details. Characters are the same way. Description anchors the character.

The first step is to christen your character. Names can give the reader a clue to the person’s personality, Sybil Rumple versus Sam Slade. Baby books, phone books, and obituaries can be good sources for names.

A nickname can also tell a lot about a character. By explaining its origin, you can add background info about the character without using a flashback.

T.S. Elliot named a character J. Alfred Prufrock. It fits the poem.

* * *

A physical description can become an “all-point bulletin” of attributes: brown hair, green eyes. Using specific details such as military buzz-cut or long ponytail can strengthen the description.

Too many details, however, can cancel each other out and overwhelm the reader. Instead, concentrate on one or two details. Rather than frontloading a story with physical descriptions, scatter the elements through the work.

Photographs can supply not only description but a clue to the character’s past.

Other senses besides visual can be used to introduce a character. Does he smell like cedar or breath mints? Is her laugh shrill?

Hmm. I need to work on that. More on character description on Thursday.

_____

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, Scholastic Press, 2008

She’s fifty or so, with gray hair that falls in an unbroken sheet to her shoulders. I’m somewhat fascinated by her hair, since it’s so uniform, so without a flaw, a wisp, even a split end. Her eyes are gray, but not like those of people from the Seam. They’re very pale, as if almost all the color has been sucked out of them. The color of slush that you wish would melt away.

I get the impression that this woman is inflexible and lacks warmth. The description tells us much more than gray hair and eyes would.

* * *

Her dark brown eyes are puffy with fatigue and she smells of metal and sweat. A bandage about her throat needed changing about three days ago. The strap of the automatic weapon slung across her back digs into her neck and she shifts her shoulder to reposition it.

Military woman who’s been on the front lines for too long?

_____

Let’s stop there and continue on Thursday.