A friend and fan asked me last week what one of my characters looks like. After giving it some thought, I had to admit that I have no idea. In fact, I have only a shady idea of what any of my characters look like. I know how they think and how they feel, and I know how they view the world; but their faces? Not a clue.
My characters are more like well-defined silhouettes for me. They have no faces.
By contrast, I visited a writer’s board a few weeks ago where a writing “expert” went on at length about how to develop physical profiles for your characters, using known actors or your own acquaintances as prototypes. Until that step is completed, this “expert” argued, you can’t have flesh-and-blood characters.
Hmm. Yet another example of how different authors’ processes work, and of how there are no hard and fast rules in any art form.
I wish I could say that my characters are deliberately faceless—part of an intentional statement on my part—but that would be lying. It’s just the way it works for me. Now that I think about it, I don’t notice faces all that much in real life. I’m notorious for failing to recognize people I’ve only recently met. I don’t say this with pride—in fact, it’s embarrassing and arguably hurtful, which is never my intent—but I remember conversations and mannerisms far more readily than I remember faces and names.
In my writing, I’m a limited third-person point of view purist. As the author, I work hard to keep myself out of the story. Every scene I write is filtered through the eyes and personality of the character who’s living it. As such, it’s difficult to make any casual observations about physical attributes. They would seem out of context to me.
As I write this, I am sitting at my desk, wearing blue jeans and a blue and white striped shirt. I have a hairline that doesn’t exist anymore, and I have a graying goatee on my chin. Those are the facts, but none of those would factor into a scene I wrote about a guy writing a blog post at is computer. The POV reality would be the thoughts flowing through the character’s head as he wrote, and, because I’m channeling the characters feelings, I might include something about the temperature of the room or the comfort of his chair. But why would I work in the clothes and the beard? How would that be relevant to his world view? I suppose he could scratch the beard and reveal it that way, but unless it contributed to character or plot, that passage would likely not survive my final edit. My number one rule: Never stop the flow of the story.
In the Jonathan Grave books, we know that Boxers is huge and that Jonathan is wiry because those are observations made about them by other point of view characters. We know that Gail Bonneville is “hot” and that she’s got great legs, because that’s what Jonathan first notices when they meet. And we know that she’s got beautiful eyes. But a face? Nope. At least not on the page.
Yet I hear from people all the time who are ready to cast the movie version of the books. (No, no such movies are in the works. Dammit.) Readers assign their own faces to characters as they read. Given the knowledge of beautiful eyes and great legs, readers can plug images from their own passions, whether it’s their current squeeze, or a favorite movie star.
This is a good thing. If one person is seeing Matt Damon in their head when they’re reading about Jonathan Grave, and another is seeing Clark Gable in his prime, does that mean I’m not doing my job as a writer? Or does it mean that I’m enhancing the imaginative potential of the story?
I’m probably not the best judge for such things, but here’s the God’s honest truth: No matter how you describe your characters in your story, the effort is going to be wasted on me because faces aren’t important. What’s important to me is the character’s heart and soul. Sell me on those, and I’ll hang on your every word.
