Would You Recognize Your Characters…

— Chuck Litka

…if you ran into them on the street? How clearly do you picture the characters you create for your stories? Do you know exactly what they look like, and how they dress? And do you consider their appearance essential to your stories? I’m curious, because I have only the vaguest idea of what my characters look like. I leave it to my readers to create their own mental picture of the characters, since I don’t have one.

One of my reasons for this, is that I don’t have a visual memory. I can’t even conjure up a mental image of my wife of forty-some years in my mind. Nor of anything else, for that matter. At best I have a vague impression in my mind, the details of which fall apart if I try to focus on the image. The condition even has a name, aphanfasia.

However, I really can’t blame aphanfasia for the lack of description of my characters. If I cared to, I could create a deck of character cards listing their distinctive characteristics. I could scour the web for photographs of people to use as models for my characters. I could keep these cards and photos on hand to consult whenever I wanted to describe how a character looked. But… well, the key words are “if I cared to.” Having lived my life without the details of how people look cluttering my mind, I don’t feel a need to include many details on how my characters look or dress in my stories.

What I do, is select a few general characteristics for each character. I may assign them an eye or a hair color. Maybe they’re slim, lanky, or stout. Maybe they wear glasses or sport a beard. I think I described the major character of my last two books as having a “pretty face.” Rather than relying on visual descriptions of the character, I try to create my characters in the reader’s mind using their dialog and how they act.

And then there’s clothing, another aspect of a character’s appearance that I also skimp on. On describing the clothing, not the clothing itself. Again, I usually mention only a few characteristic features. I picture my spacemen wearing nautical clothes straight out of the clipper ship era, so they have caps (for no particular reason). I have a ship captain who wears a yellow sweater with his black uniform and a sentient robot butler that sports a yellow paisley tie with his formal black suit – as a mark of individuality.

No doubt this light handed approach to character descriptions would not work in some genres and some stories. There are genres where readers expect detailed descriptions of how the characters look, and how they dress – scene by scene. In these cases, omitting detailed descriptions of characters and dress would not meet readers’ expectations. Plus, in many types of stories, clothes can be used to define, or at least hint at, some of the character’s deeper characteristics, as well as their role in society and the story. And as such, describing what they wear may be essential to the story.

However, in my case, I believe that I can rely on my readers to fill in the blanks. And by being unspecific, I’m giving them agency to visualize my characters as they would have them look. Writing for a world audience, being unspecific is likely a plus.

But enough about my approach. How do you approach describing your characters? Do you love to create fully realized mental pictures characters? How do you create them? Do you imagine them first in your mind as a picture, and then describe them in words? Or do they take form as you write more and more about them? I know of one writer who uses a program called “Daz Studio” to create 3D images of her characters – mostly for her own amusement. Still, it is a way to bring imagined people closer to life.  

And finally, how important is the appearances of your characters in your stories and in the stories that you read? Share your opinions and your process.