/lit/ - Literature

>implying i do this sort of shit
>implying i am a hack
fuck you

I don't describe them. Normally they don't even have names.

If someone has some important characteristic to the plot, I show them through the eyes of other characters.

>>4386727
all you need is one fucking descriptive and you can pepper the rest of your story with little throwaways to their appearance. 9 times out of 10 the reader doesn't give a shit what the character looks like unless it has some kind of relevance or your prose is good

>>4386742
>>4386743
>>4386814

Further proof Hemmmmmmmmingway killed American literature.

It depends, I don't want to have some phantom magicall interacting with the world but I dont want to launch into a DF tier description either. Gotta find that balance.

>being unable to describe the appearance of a character on one sentence
Why are you even writing?

>>4386742
>>4386743
>>4386814
>>4387694
Thats all you have to say about describing characters appearance? Dont?

why don't you think of a creative and non-lame way of doing it?

>>4387562
>Blaming all this on Hemingway

I didn't realize this sort of thing was a problem until I read a friend's work and saw that every single character he introduced got a full-blown description of their hair color, their face, their body type, their legs, and everything they were wearing before continuing with the story.

I think if you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it might be important to describe whatever the alien orcs look like you're writing, but otherwise... "a man" or "a woman" works pretty well. If it's important to your story that the woman is dressed for work, or that the man looks like he hasn't slept in days, it doesn't matter. There's no need to paint the character exactly the way you see them in your head.

>>4388086
>If
I meant unless.

>>4388010
Is the character's appearance important for your short story? Or are there enough characters that you'd need to give them distinguishing features to help differentiate them? Borges, Kafka, Hemingway, and many other short story writers rarely describe the physical appearance of characters, or do so as a passing detail.

>>4386727
I'm really bad at giving physical descriptions because I am obsessed with ambiguity and the undefined.

So I don't.

I'd rather let the reader assume that everyone is attractive and anime because I am a hack.

I don't describe characters in short stories, mostly because I'm too focused on plot or dialogue to care what they look like.
However, in my novel, I tailor my descriptions to the situation. For example, if a character sees someone not much out of the ordinary, there's a few descriptors in one or two sentences. But if they encounter someone totally out of their experience, I have been known to spend paragraphs on description.

>>4388010
In passing detail and using the most important characteristic of your characters.
If you really need to make a full-fledged, photograph-like description; then try to put the last details sparingly on the following sentences.

Just don't be Ivanhoe.

>>4388113
>I'd rather let the reader assume that everyone is attractive and anime because I am a hack.
I just wanted my characters to be pretty, man.

>>4388010
a character should never be a set of clothes, you're better off communicating their thoughts and personality

but i'm a modernist at heart.

>>4386727

Depends on the character. The main gets almost no description, i.e. "A dark haired man."

Supportive and backround characters get more description because it helps build the scene.

I personally think that what a character looks like in a book should be left mainly up to the imagination though.

Character descriptions, when it comes to appearance, never meant much to me. Setting is higher priority. If I've got somewhere to place them it doesn't matter what they look like so much.

Might mention a feature in passing, like height or hair colour or smile quality, if it adds something to the story.

>>4388449
To clarify, this is for short stories. In longer fiction, though I'm crap at it, including proper descriptions is kind of what people expect.

>>4388470
those people expect the wrong things

>>4388475
Brb, commenting out descriptions and looking for a new editor.

>>4388021
>>4388086
>>4388108
>>4388113
>>4388185
>>4388298
>>4388398
>>4388442
>>4388449
>>4388470
So if I understood all of you correctly:
Its because you dont have the confidence in your ability to describe people?

>>4389159
Nah, I just know that people would be annoyed with me if I made extensive descriptions everytime a character appears on a SHORT story.
Which is partly why I often limit myself to one well-defined character on short stories.

Let the reader fill in the blanks

Very simple and important characteristics. Most short stories don't require much description of appearances.

Depends. Sometimes I'll just give some back story on the character and let the blanks fill in as they will. Other times I'll spend a few hundred words on his/her description. It really depends on the character and from what point of view he/she is being introduced.
I think giving the reader a grasp on their personality is more important then physical characteristics. Sometime physical characteristics can give hints about the characters personality. For example if I were to say "He had a stern face and a small golden crucifix hung from his neck" or something like that you could probably get a decent mental image of what he looks like but also make some deductions about this characters personality (he's probably religious, probably old, probably a dick).

Upon introduction I focus on the character's most prominent features, and add more detail over the span of their character ark if it is needed. I leave the rest up to the imagination.

>>4388398
>modernism
Mah nigga. Autumn is better than winter.

>>4389521
>ark
next!

>>4389228
>a few hundred words on description
Tripfag, please, send me a pastebin of one of your stories.

>>4389533
Don't be like that, c'moooooooon

>>4387562
The people on this board can learn from Hemingway.

>>4389521
>character ark
>being so imconpetent that you need to bend the plot to develop one character
Do you write for anime?

>>4390792
>I can't into character development.

>>4386727
I give it a few sentences.

Seriously. Fuck relevancy. I try to make it enjoyable to read but hey, thats whats in the scene right now, thats how he/she/it looks.

Less with protagonists the viewpoints of which we take, but with most other characters, Ill show you what they look like.

Come at me minimalists.

>>4386727
In short stories, very rarely unless something about the character's appearance is plot-critical.

In longer works, I usually give description of notable facial features - one of my characters has a long beard, for example. I also make an exception for two pairs of characters: One pair are figurative "dark opposites", and look nearly identical except for their eye colour, the other pair has blond hair and blue eyes, which is important to their roles in the work.

>>4391138
oh, this doesnt apply to stories of a certain brevity of course

Seeing as you're posting pictures from anime, the problem is you want to focus on character designs like anime does, but don't realize this doesn't transfer to prose well. Novels arn't anime so stop imagining animes and writing them in.

Man, Tatami Galaxy is such an art piece.
I'd like to read the novel but since I don't read moon runes I'll have to die without read it.

>>4393173
There's this guy who is translating it but at a pace of 2 pages per week. He even admitted this is slow, but it's something:

http://tatami.cadet-nine.org/

Maybe we will fully read it in our lifetime

>>4393886
Thank you.

Seeing as I write rather average fiction for young adult females, I try and make the characters face something every young adult female could identify with. Prettier than average yet not drop dead gorgeous, and always self concious/insecure about their looks (and unaware of their own attractiveness). I always describe the hair though, and the characters own favourite feature about themselves (usually the eyes inherited from the mother that died in childbirth). Make everything as cliched as possible. But - only if thats what your demographic would like. Think what your demographic would want to know about the character they are going to become, give them enough to nudge them in the right direction but make sure they can fill in lots of blanks themselves too.

I don't, generally.

The best they usually get is someone else might comment on them being good looking or something like that. They might also get a hair colour if someone else says it. Their height is left up to inference. If my character goes around thinking of most people as short then s/he's obviously tall. That sort of thing.

Giving in depth descriptions of a character is a waste of space. If you got 100 people to read the exact same description then draw the character, you'd get 100 different ideas of exactly what those features look like. Rather than describing a them you're better off saying "the good looking redhead" or something general that allows readers to infer their own appearance.

>2011

Wow, that's a long time ago!

indirectly as much as is possible