The car analogy is great. I’d add that there are some reasonably competent but not great writers whose books are like driving a bumper car. It’s not the sublime, high-performance experience of driving a Corvette on an empty road, but neither is it the frustrating experience of trying to coax a clunker through stop-and-go traffic. It’s just a fun, zany diversion that’s not meant to go anywhere.
And I’m with you 100% on podcasts and videos. Ugh.
So when the author describes someone:
The lieutenant was a woman in her thirties. Under the golden disks of her shades, she wore cheekbones from some Amerindian ancestor and a wide slash of a mouth that was currently set in a sardonic line. The sunglasses were jammed on a nose you could have opened cans on. Short, untidy hair framed the whole face and stuck up in spikes at the front. She had wrapped herself in an outsize combat jacket, but the long, black-encased legs that protruded from its lower edge were a clear hint of the lithe body within.
Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs Novels Book 1) (p. 21). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
That’s just a set of data points? That doesn’t evoke an image in your head of what Ortega might look like?
I do have a sense of what she might look like, but it’s not a visual image in my head. If I try, I can get something resembling an image; but it’s made up of bits and pieces, not something I can see all at once.
What I do get is a sense of what that appearance is probably meant by the author to mean in terms of personality, physical ability, and whether, for instance, the character’s likely to be concerned about the possible effects of what she does next on her hairstyle. ETA: or, for that matter, concerned that she wants anybody looking at her to see her as “sexy”, except that she might well not want them to. Etcetera.
And if the movie casts in that role a person with no sharp edges who looks “conventionally attractive”, I know I probably don’t want to see the movie.
I’m with you. If I try really hard I could put together an image of that lieutenant but it would be gone three seconds later and I could never call it up when she returns in the book.
It must be like true color blindness. People who have it can’t imagine what seeing color is like and people who don’t can’t imagine how people couldn’t.
See, I have a mental picture of a woman with golden sunglasses who looks vaguely Hispanic with a sharp nose, strange hair and nice legs, who’s wrapped up in what in my mind, looks a lot like a US Army field jacket, but gray. That’s the thing- my mind will fill in gaps where it can, and revise them as I find out more information.
As far as the casting goes, Netflix butchered “Altered Carbon” when they adapted it. Martha Higareda was way too hot to be Ortega, and that’s the very least of the show’s sins.
Unless the character’s appearance is a key plot point, I don’t even try to put together a mental image of them. Why bother? It just isn’t an important part of the story to me. Same-same for the pages of prose describing the scenery, or Tom Clancy’s endless techno-porn descriptions of weaponry. It took me decades before I realized that Rod Walker (“Tunnel In the Sky”) was supposed to be black, for example.
I have no problem putting together mental images, but I also tend to agree with an old college professor I had: “Unless it’s somehow important to the plot, like the hero has a birthmark that proves he’s the true heir to the throne or something like that, what literary characters look like is utterly unimportant.”
I also tend to skip over physical descriptions of characters, especially if they go on for a long time. Occasionally writers will omit a character’s name, and just identify them as “the blonde” or “the taller man” or whatever. Which always irritates me, because I usually haven’t bothered to memorize who was blonde, or which man was taller.
I think the point is that, for some readers, it’s no bother: it’s something that happens automatically, at least if the written description is vivid enough. At least for people like that, if it requires signficant effort to put together a mental image from the verbal description, that’s evidence of bad writing.
But also, if the story is written (by a competent author) from a first-person or limited third-person point of view, the descriptions you read don’t just tell you how the characters (and places and things) look objectively: they tell you how they are perceived and come across to the viewpoint character.
The description that @bump quoted above didn’t include enough context that I could tell what its POV was, so I don’t know if that was supposed to be how that character looks to the camera, or what stood out to the character through whose eyes we were seeing her.
Speaking of visualizing main characters–am I the only who visualizes themselves as the main character when reading a book?
Interesting that you got “nice legs” out of “lithe”, while I got “in good physical condition.”
I don’t generally do that; but I do often want to insert some avatar of me in there, who would do or say something that the characters in the book aren’t doing.
But I think a lot of people do.
That’s why I lost interest in The Wheel of Time. Starting with the 5th book or so, Jordan would introduce 1000 new characters and describe what they were wearing. This would go on for 600 pages, then the action took place in the last 50 pages.
I don’t want to see cursive writing, ever! If you absolutely have to hand me something written on a piece of paper, PRINT. Thank you!
I’ve been reading to my kid, and I’ve been encountering a slightly different kind of bad writing - shit that is a pain to read aloud. It ranges from whole books that don’t use contractions to some truly terrible sentence structure. Sometimes it’s awkward placement of a “… he said…” break in the middle of dialog. I sometimes omit those entirely because I can do a bunch of voices.
Sometimes I wonder if these authors ever actually speak out loud what they’ve written.
I used to be able to subtly rearrange words to match my own cadence, but he’s beginning the process of learning to read. If I’m running my finger across the words, I want what I speak to match.
Just the opposite. I always think of how utterly different I am from any of the characters.
Your example is a pretty vivid and expressive description, so yes, I would tend to form a partial mental image that fits. But descriptions are usually less specific or mostly just implied, and my mental images of characters tend to be correspondingly vague and incomplete. There must be some concept of an image there because whenever I see a TV or movie based on the book, the characters invariably look much different than I think they should. But it would be impossible for me to describe to a sketch artist what this nebulous mental image actually looked like, because it’s an odd mixture of incomplete physical pieces and personality traits. It’s as if as soon as it gains a tangible form, it always looks wrong.
I’m about 50/50 on them getting the characters right when something’s adapted for the screen.
Some productions, like “The Expanse” nail it eerily hard. Pretty much all the main characters looked nearly exactly like I’d pictured them in my head.
Others don’t nail the looks so well, but the writers and actors nail the characters very well. Paul Bettany’s Dr. Stephen Maturin in “Master and Commander” is a great example. Same with Uhtred and Finan in “The Last Kingdom”. For some reason, I pictured Uhtred as a more Chris Hemsworth-esque character, and Finan as more wiry and skinny than the guy who portrayed him. But the actors they had did a fantastic job with the characters themselves.
Where I tend to really get it wrong vs. TV/movies is in the landscape/sets. I never quite get any of that right- it’s always prettier than I imagined, or somehow off in terms of the ornateness, decrepitude, etc…
I told my kids “If you clicked on a video to learn how to do something, and some way-too-happy host starts out with ‘Okaaaay, how’s everybody doin’ today?', then skip ahead at least a minute.”
They rolled their eyes and said “Well, duh, Dad…”
I’m pretty far the other direction. The other day, I was thinking about a house I’d seen… wasn’t sure it was a real house or something I’d seen on TV. I could picture the weathered architectural trim, the ivy climbing up the side, the loose boards on the wraparound porch…
This bugged me all day until I realized it was from a book!
I’d created such a detailed image in my mind that I could replay it any time (doing it now, in fact).
And I can certainly still do what I call “falling into the book”: becoming so immersed in it that I lose track of time and of whatever else is going on.
That’s wonderful. I was tutoring, and one thing I learned is that many people who learn to read as older adults will never get “lost in a book”. Broke my heart.
It’s been a few decades so I don’t remember anything approaching, 'Disagreeable country" levels of bad, but given it was a paperback and dirt cheap, it must have been the cheapest possible translation. I don’t think even Joss Whedon and Quentin Tarantino could punch up what I read. It seriously read like the most tedious marine biologist lecture ever, with the professor frequently wandering off-topic to talk about some guy he met on a submarine. Pity it wasn’t a more entertaining version, like the Icelandic version of Dracula. BTW, I agree with the article. Stoker’s book was tedious.
Same here. It was a big step forward in my development as a writer when I realized my characters were nothing like me. (Other than my current novel, where I’m a charaacter in it).
As for bad writing, I just stop reading. Outside of school, no one is ever required to finish a book.