…But for god’s sake, if the protagonist in the book you’re writing has a nose piercing, don’t wait until page 171 to mention it!
As I read, I usually picture the characters from your descriptions. If your character’s physical descriptions are vague, I will imagine a nondescript ordinary looking person. I will NOT imagine a person with a nose ring unless you mention the nose ring when introducing the character.
Finding out the protagonist has a nose ring halfway through the book is jarring. I’ve been visualizing this character differently since the beginning of the story. And since the nose ring has no direct bearing on the story, suddenly inserting it into the prose is unnecessary, and just bad writing.
For cryin’ out loud, your cover blurb says you write for The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times, and you pull a stunt like this? What the hell?
I don’t mind a main character with a nose ring. I just think it should be mentioned in the main character’s introduction.
No. That’s the point. I was imagining an average looking person. Nose rings, while not uncommon, are NOT an automatic assumption when visualizing a vaguely described character.
Facial characteristics are important in the visualization of a story. Bodily characteristics less so. Had the author mentioned, say, an arm tattoo for the first time on page 171, it would be different. But something distinct about the face? Say it in the first few paragraphs.
I guess the author had a different idea what an average person looks like than you did. But isn’t that why we read - to see the world through other peoples’ eyes?
It’s still jarring. What’s wrong with mentioning quickly in the first few lines, “As she gazed in the mirror, twisting her hair scrunchie into place, she noticed the florescent lighting gave a odd glint to the gold in her nose ring.” Then it’s out there and done.
Apart from the clumsy cliche of the character analyzing their own appearance in a mirror, which Darren Garrison points out, I think that the casual mention of the nose ring that late in the book is actually making a narrative point–that to this character, her nose ring is not a big deal. So much so that’s it’s barely even worth mentioning. In her mind, having a nose ring can, in fact, fall into the category of “nondescript” and “ordinary-looking.” That says something about the character’s view of the world, and it says it much more elegantly than if the author had flatly stated, “She wore a nose ring, but didn’t think it was any big deal.”
But then, I’m famous for not giving a shit what literary characters look like, and I tend to skip over physical descriptions. Occasionally an author will mix things up by using “the blonde” or “the redhead” rather than the character’s name. And I always have a moment of confusion, because I never bother to memorize which character is blonde and which is redheaded.
The girl is training to be a sushi chef. She brings her knives to be sharpened at a store, and the clerk expresses surprise that a young girl with a nose ring would want to be a sushi chef.
This is the first mention of a nose ring. I don’t know if it comes up later.
The author thinks that the nose ring is unique enough that he would have one trivial character make a judgment statement about a main character. It’s not a plot reveal as the main character always has this visible feature in the book’s universe.
Springing that info on the reader this late in the plot is just bad form.
