Why less detail makes more believable characters
The question came up on the NaNoWriMo Forums as to whether to include a little or a lot of character description. I think less is more, and I’ll tell you why. It’s all about believability.
We’ve all seen books where characters are introduced with a lengthy, dry passage of description that sounds more like a police blotter report than anything else:
Jakob walked into the room. 6’2", burly build, wearing pin-striped Armani tailored to perfection. His shoes were black patent leather, with flawless white spats. His hair was a close-cropped buzz cut, greying, but still echoing his background as a Navy Seal. The scar running from the corner of his left eye, downward, then back to the corner of his jaw only re-enforced the image. He stuck one of his huge hands into an inner pocket of his suit, and withdrew a mirror-finish gold cigarette case. I was pretty sure he could crush a coconut in those giant mitts if he wanted to. He lit a smoke and asked, in his low smoky voice, “So. Did you bring the money?”
Boring, isn’t it? And that’s the best I can make it. Detail, detail, detail, hammering on your brain. Remember this! Remember that! Isn’t it vivid now? See see see!
The problem with this is not that any of the particular details are bad. In and of themselves, they’re fine, colorful details. Nor is the problem that the details don’t contribute to a portrayal. They do.
The problem comes in the attempt to paint a fully unambiguous picture of the person, one that leaves no flexibility whatsoever in the reader’s mind as to how you envisioned the character.
Stereotypes are good
When introducing a character, you’re usually better off sticking with broad strokes. The important thing at that point is not what color hair someone has or how tall they are, but rather, what kind of person they are. The important thing is to give the reader a framework for understanding that person and how they might act.
For that, nothing beats a stereotype.
I may get some flak for saying that, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Sure, in real life we strive not to stereotype people, because real people are infinitely varied. When we get to know any real person, we always find that there is more to them than just a stereotype.
But you’re not writing real life. You’re writing a novel. And for that, giving the reader a simple stereotype is a great strategy. In just a few words, you can establish probably 80% of what the reader needs to know. In the process, you set a framework you can later build on. Keep it short:
Jakob walked into the room. Tall. Big. I’ve known enough like him to spot the type. Military, probably ex-Navy Seal if I had to guess. Something about the way he carried himself. “So,” he barked at me, “did you bring the money?”
The stereotype is just a starting point
Just because you start with a stereotype doesn’t mean you’re stuck there. You’re free—and encouraged!—to build on the stereotype with additional telling details. The Armani suit, for example, says something about how well the guy has done since leaving the military.
You can even add even details which contradict the stereotype. But if you’ve got any of that going on, you’re strongly advised to introduce those details early. Do it before the reader becomes convinced by default that the opposite is true. For example, if Jacob was wounded in action and walks with a cane and a severe limp, you’d better tell us that up front:
Jakob walked into the room, slowly and leaning heavily on a cane. Tall. Big. I’ve known enough like him to spot the type. Military, probably ex-Navy Seal if I had to guess. Something about the way he carried himself carried through, in spite of his limp. “So,” he barked at me, “did you bring the money?”
Unless—as with any such rules of writing—it works not to. You might keep a contradictory detail secret if you’re going to spring a big twist with it later. Like, maybe instead of being wounded, Jakob was dishonorably discharged and that’s something you’re going to use to create a plot twist later.
Either way, set the stereotype quickly, as briefly as you can. Use the absolute minimum of details necessary for the scene to carry the emotional weight it needs to, and to avoid “hey, you didn’t tell me he has a limp” type plot holes.
Wait, you said it was all about believability
I did, and that’s true. Because the reason we describe characters at all is to make readers feel and believe certain things about them. Jakob, as portrayed here, is clearly intended to be an intimidating, formidable character. That’s really all we need readers to know, so they can be worried on the protagonist’s behalf. That’s it. Everything else is superfluous, and harmful to believability.
Stereotypes work precisely because they leave more to readers’ imaginations. If we give reader a “looks like an ex-Navy Seal” stereotype, they’ll get whatever mental image they get, based on all the people they’ve ever known, met, and seen in their lives. Whatever any particular reader imagines for himself or herself, will by definition be the most believable representation for that reader. A stereotype, yes, but a stereotype based on real patterns of real people. Different from yours, maybe, but 100% believable to the reader.
Less is more in character descriptions: use stereotypes to create believability; details to create dimensionality.
Use the stereotype to your advantage
A stereotype brings to a wealth of details to the reader’s mind for free, at absolutely zero additional word count. Those details exist, and where they are predictable you can use them to your benefit.
Let’s take eye color as an example. In the NaNoWriMo novel I’m writing this month, I have a young woman of Cuban/Hispanic descent. The reader got that stereotype in the first scene when we met her. Much later, in the first-kiss scene between her and my MC, the stereotype supplied a detail I could work with to flesh out the moment between the characters. Here, they’re sitting on a couch, leaning ever closer to each other:
She’s looking right in my eyes, and we’re so close I can see her eyes aren’t pure black. There’s tiny little dark brown flecks in them.
This works because I can predict with almost 100% certainty that any random reader’s “mid-20s, Cuban/Hispanic woman” stereotype is going to have dark eyes. So when I refer to her eyes as being dark—something that was never mentioned explicitly in her original description—I reward readers by re-enforcing the detail they imagined for themselves. It’s a subtle way of telling them “yes, you have envisioned this character the right way,” and bam! the reader’s belief in the character is cemented forever.
All I have to do is not contradict the stereotype too much. I build on the stereotype, rather than contravening it radically. If, in that scene, I had suddenly said she had piercing blue eyes or something, that would make readers hate me for being a total idiot. And they’d be right to do so; the detail just wouldn’t fit.
Stereotypes create belief; details create dimension
You get a reader’s deep buy-in, their suspension of disbelief, from tapping into the reader’s mental stereotypes and forcing them to imagine the details. And you do that by giving only the minimum of detail necessary to guide the reader to the correct, story-relevant, stereotype.
You get dimensionality, differentiation from the stereotype, by carefully layering small additional details on top of the stereotype, like putting brown flecks in a woman’s black eyes.
Less is More
Less is more because when you toss in too much detail, you’re telling your readers how to envision the character, rather than showing your readers how to envision the character for themselves. That’s a guaranteed losing game, because you’ll never—and I do mean never—be able to tell them anything that’s as convincing and believable as what you can lead them to invent on their own.
All the stereotype does is let you control, limit, and predict what they’re going to invent, so you can keep their imagination in line with your story.
November 17, 2010 00:22 UTC
10 Comments:
Posted by Jason Black on November 17, 2010 05:24 UTC
@Leah—
Thanks! And yeah, you touch on kind of a side point that I ended up leaving out of the post: when you do want to bring up one of those layered details, find a point in the story where it naturally fits in and allows you to create, develop, or re-enforce something of much greater significance in the story. Don’t just stick a detail in anywhere. That is, I could have written this into the scene earlier, while the MC and his lady friend were still having dinner:
I caught her eyes—which were almost black, but not quite, sporting little brown flecks here and there—across the table. “More wine?” I asked.
So, NOT that. I think we can all agree, definitely NOT that. :)
Posted by Aimee on November 17, 2010 05:47 UTC
Very good point. I like to start with one bold characteristic, such as ‘"Good morning,” he rasped around the cigarette between his teeth,’ and build on that as the conversation builds, Then I like to add details as the story develops around that character. Of course, that’s a main character. Secondary characters get a quick reference, as you described above, just enough detail to give you an idea.
I like the way you refer to what I think I did above as stereotyping. I’d never looked at it that way.
Posted by Gwen Hernandez on November 17, 2010 06:23 UTC
Super post. I often notice that by the time a writer tells me what color her hair is, or that it’s short, it doesn’t matter. I’ve already imagined her, and she won’t change regardless of what the author tells me. It’s something I need to keep in mind with my own characters as I write them.
And your point about stereotypes makes a lot of sense. Just like studies have shown that we can fairly accurately peg people with just tiny “slices” of exposure to them, characters in a book are the same way. We just have to choose those slices carefully.
I never regret reading your blog. Thanks!
Posted by Jason Black on November 17, 2010 06:53 UTC
@Gwen—
I never regret reading your blog. Thanks!
Heh. I never regret writing it. You’re welcome.
@Aimee—
Yeah, we tend to think of stereotyping as being restricted to questions of race and class, but really, it’s much broader than that. For novelists, the other big category of stereotypes is professions. Quick: Think of a firefighter. A secretary. A doctor. A teacher.
Chances are you thought of a man, a woman, a man, and another woman, just to take a crass example. Yet, it’s true that most firefighters are men. Most teachers are women. Although, that’s a tricky one because “teacher” itself carries connotations of primary education. Now, if I said “quick, think of a professor,” the stereotype is much more likely to switch to being male.
Not fair, of course, to all female firefighters, male secretaries, et cetera, but that’s how our brains work. We generalize to the most common traits among ANYTHING that has a category label. Think of a plate: chances are you thought of something circular, although you can certainly buy square tableware if you want it.
For us novelists, the key issue becomes being aware of the stereotypes so we can work with them. We use them as shorthands for conveying those whole long, boring police-blotter style descriptions, and we explicitly look for ways to present our contradictory details at story-appropriate moments.
But we can’t do any of that if we don’t first recognize and admit the reality of stereotypes. We don’t have to like the reality, we don’t have to agree that it’s how reality even should be, but we do have to recognize it as reality. Stereotyping is just how our brains work.
This is a case where being politically correct will definitely NOT help you at all...
Posted by Joe Iriarte on November 18, 2010 02:25 UTC
Great stuff. As I read this, I thought about another reason why this makes the writing more believable: how many times have you met someone, and then found you couldn’t remember many details about the person? Did you cross paths with your boss or your neighbor this morning? What color shirt was he or she wearing? Hell, I don’t remember what color shirt my <i>wife</i> is wearing <i>tonight</i>.
The fact is, when we real people meet new people, all we tend to take note of is the type. The nuances, the deviation from the type, is all stuff we layer in later. The same should hold when we meet fictional characters. Makes sense to me.
What I wanted to ask you about was that point where we transcend the stereotype. You say not to contradict the stereotype, but that comes in the form of obvious things the observer would have noticed right away, like eye color. What about when it comes to the assumptions the observer would naturally have drawn? Wouldn’t a reversal at that point actually make the characterization become <i>more</i> real? Maybe not for a minor character, but for a significant one?
I’m reminded of the movie <i>Juno.</i> When I finished watching that movie, I noticed that I thought I knew how everyone fit together after the first hour. The characters were all types I’d seen before. Then the unraveling of the movie basically subverted most of the assumptions I’d made. But not about superficial things like physical appearance, but on deeper things like, well, who is a good guy and who is not.
Thoughts?
Posted by Jason Black on November 18, 2010 04:24 UTC
@Joe—
Great comments. And I think you’re on to something. Choosing to reverse the inner qualities of the stereotype, while leaving the outer qualities alone, can work really well. I think it works because of course we all have plenty of experiences of people turning out not to be like we thought they were. It’s a thing that happens. It’s not always expected, but it’s still basically a normal occurance.
So on some level, readers are primed just by life to accept such a reversal.
Conversely, only in rare circumstances (and ones with atypical reasons behind them) do we suddenly find out that outer qualities are different than we thought. We don’t meet someone, know them for a while, and then suddenly discover that they’re really six inches taller than we thought. That never happens. Life primes us to expect a certain continuity of outer qualities. We might suddenly discover that someone really has brown eyes instead of blue, and that they’ve been wearing colored contacts up until now. Or we might discover that someone we thought was well-coiffed is actually bald but wearing a really convincing wig. But that’s about the greatest extent to which we see unexpected reversals of outer qualities.
Stereotypes, of course, are packages that mix both inner and outer qualities. So as writers, we have to pay attention to the different levels of expectation—the different levels of certainty readers will place on their assumptions—of each kind of attribute.
Readers will have very high confidence in any outer qualities they infer from a stereotype, precisely because they’re visible (or audible, or smellable, or whatever). Conversely, they’ll have lower confidence in their inferences about inner qualities, precisely because those aren’t visible.
So if you’re going to mess with a character’s outer qualities, if you’re going to intentionally deviate physically from the stereotype, you better tell the reader right away. But if you’re going to mess with an inner quality, hey, that’s fine. Let it come out naturally at the right point in the story. As long as you present the reversal in a smooth and natural-feeling manner, readers will go with you.
Thanks for the thought-provoking comment!
Posted by Joe Iriarte on November 18, 2010 14:10 UTC
You nailed what I was trying to articulate—inner versus outer. It sounds simple when you put it that way! Thinking of it that way makes it seem more like something that can be planned and managed instead of a seat-of-the-pants thing, is-it-too-much-or-too-little thing. Thanks!
(And now, just because I’m curious . . . /test/ . . . test . . . test . . .)
Posted by K.M. Weiland on November 18, 2010 19:30 UTC
Good post. Stereotypes are inevitable, even if we wanted to eliminate them from our writing. It’s much better to recognize them, use them when necessary, and play off them wherever we can. Some of the best characters are those that are stereotypes in all but one little detail. That one fresh detail brings everything else into stunning contrast.
Posted by Peter Anderson on November 19, 2010 04:58 UTC
See, that’s the thing. If you do too much, a publisher will say it’s too much. I try your tack and they say, ‘But I can’t see him.’ There are other dire imagination deficits in the publishing world (you know, like plot, structure, characterisation etc...) but this one irks the most... Great post.
Posted by Leah on November 17, 2010 01:52 UTC
Great post, Jason! I use a similar method, but like to think of it in terms of art: loose pencil sketch vs. densely layered painting. I try to stick to the pencil sketch, specifying only a few salient details of any character and leaving the reader’s imagination to fill in the rest.
The timing of revealing detail is something I also like to play with. A full dossier the instant someone walks through a door is so cliché.
You gave a great example of your MC noticing the true color of his love interest’s eyes. He couldn’t have known this until they were close for the first time. Not only does it help us more clearly envision the love interest, but it serves to reinforce the intimacy growing between these two characters. Only someone who cares about her and is close to her would know something like that.
As you said, it’s a balancing act: you need to hint at and define expectations to some degree so the reveal doesn’t jar the reader, but comes across as a payoff for our curiosity and our own efforts at imagining.