Applying this to myself as though I were a character in a book, I’ve got maybe eight or nine or so uncommon appearance characteristics that would have to be mentioned to pass the “not jarring me later” test (though my standards might well be different from the OP’s). That’s beside the more common stuff. Going through all of that in one scene would drag me out of a story a lot more than “Oh, she has a nose ring? Ok, I’ll incorporate that into my mental picture”.
Then you, my friend, would need more than a couple of lines description as a literary character introduction. Maybe not all at once, but enough so that that third eye in your forehead would not come as a shock once you are halfway through the book.
And I’m sorry, getting halfway through the book, which in my case is about two weeks of investment in a character, only to discover the person has a freakin’ nose ring is jarring. It’s not like the whole story is ruined for me now. But it would’ve been a better picture for me if I had know this particular tidbit before. I shouldn’t have to be rearranging my visual references two weeks into the goddamn story.
And this is why reception theory is so important to be able to grapple with: The meaning of a text (interpreted broadly, a “text” is anything a person experiences and interprets, inclusive of movies, TV shows, source code, pottery, signs, graffiti, paintings, music, supermarket advertisements, and screaming at 3 AM) is determined, in part, by how the recipient receives it and interprets it. There’s no way for the author to directly beam their thoughts into our heads, so we constantly interpret symbols of various kinds and, since symbolic communication is lossy and imperfect, we must fill in the gaps to make sense of it. Everyone does it slightly differently, so everyone experiences a slightly different text, with the differences increasing the further afield you travel, in space or in time.
So. Two Many Cats, you said you imagined a “nondescript ordinary looking person”. Holy mother of culture-bound complexes of complicated assumptions. Since you’re posting in English on a modern message board, I assume you assume people have races. Therefore, this “nondescript ordinary looking person” has a race. Which race is determined by how old you are, where you grew up, and what you see the character as in terms of job, educational attainment, wealth level, and the language they speak, which is another assumption you have.
My point is, the author may or may not share any of those assumptions with you, and may or may not view your ordinary as marked and special in some way. Since multiple people are against description-dumps and, apparently, mirrors, there’s no way for the author to clear this up until our culture changes its stance on novels for adults having pictures other than the one on the cover.
Long story short, don’t expect this kind of shock to ever stop happening.
Boy, you would have hated reading science fiction short stories from the first half of the 20th century. They reveled in surprise twists. “The people that you thought were aliens? They were really humans.” “The people that you thought were humans? They were really aliens.” “That desert of orange sand the people were traveling across? They are actually really, really tiny and are walking thorough a container of Tang.”
(Yes, that last one was a real story.)
“After a hearty sneeze, she was mortified by the string of viscous snot anchored between the hanky and her piercing.”
Oh, and the best/worst: “The viewpoint character was Black! Bet that knocked you back, huh?! Huh?!”
Of course, back in 1953, it did knock people back so far they’d cancel subscriptions. (“Judgment Day”, Weird Fantasy, March-April 1953) Another example of how the meaning of a text (bold anti-racist sentiment or nearly incomprehensible non-twist) is greatly influenced by who reads it.
We are not talking about twists of plot. We are talking about simple appearances. I just want a reasonable idea of what a character looks like early on in the story.
From the replies in this thread, I’m guessing this is an outrageous request.
Yes, but I’m talking about stories where the aliens look alien and the humans look human, and the only way to hide those details is to not describe their physical appearances in the story.
It isn’t an outrageous request, but the character’s physical appearance isn’t very important to me personally, and I usually skim past those details. I think of the characters more abstractly than visually. Nothing wrong with the way that you do it, but it isn’t the way that I do.
(And now I’m thinking of the famous classic passage where Robinson Crusoe strips off all his clothes, swims to the wrecked ship, and fills his pockets with supplies.)
I dunno… at the high school where I’m currently teaching, nose rings are so common, they barely rate a notice or a mention.
Twenty-five years ago, telling us that a girl had a tattoo, a navel piercing or a nose ring MAY have told us something about her personality, and so it would have rated a mention in an introductory description.
But now? A girl with a nose ring could be EITHER a Yale-bound nerd or a rebel. She could be either a slut OR a virgin. She could be either trailer trash OR a preppy.She could be a butch lesbian or a frilly, girly girl. In my school, a nose ring is as common and meaningless as a bracelet or a necklace. A girl with a nose ring could be Joan Jett OR Marcia Brady. And it wouldn’t bother me if a book didn’t mention a girl’s bracelet or necklace until late in the game.
Some people mentally picture the characters and settings of books they read, some don’t—we’ve had at least one thread discussing this.
For people who do have a vivid visual imagination, it can be at least mildly disconcerting to be picturing someone, and later be told by the author that the character looks, in some significant way, different from how the reader has been picturing him or her. Kinda like watching a movie made from a book, in which the characters or settings look substantially different from the way you imagined them while reading the book.
I tend to sympathize with the OP. Authors: for the sake of readers who do picture your characters, if there’s anything distinctive about their facial features—a nose ring, a mustache, a conspicuous mole, anything that a person couldn’t help noticing when looking at them—either mention it up front, or don’t mention it at all.
I wouldn’t generally think that a nose ring is such a big deal that it must be remarked upon when the protagonist’s appearance is first discussed. I don’t need a perfect image of the protagonist on the first page. In my world, nose rings aren’t really a big deal.
In the protagonist’s world, though, a nose ring is sufficiently unusual that people who don’t know her remark to her about it. It’s grounds for the clerk’s prejudice. Failing to tell us about the nose ring earlier fails to help us understand the protagonist and her relationship to the world she inhabits. I think it is a little bit of a problem in the book.
Imagine a different book where the protagonist is turned down for a job that she really hoped to get. The book led you to believe she was a stellar candidate. The interviewer turns her down because, as is suddenly revealed, she has a swastika face tattoo! Would you feel a little cheated then? Might you then reconsider earlier incidents like the Rabbi who didn’t want to give her directions to the synagogue or the teacher who never calls in her in class? Wouldn’t you have wanted to know about the face tattoo earlier?
First, let me point out that fiction is not reality. I know this sounds like a very stupid, obvious, and trite thing to say, so let me explain what I mean by that. Books have a lot more space for this kind of description compared to, say, comics or movies. But the writer has to deal in more words, so description is doubly important. For any writer, detail falls into two categories, and for prose or storytelling it is especially critical to pay attention:
- Important things the reader needs to be told.
- Unimportant things that you shouldn’t mention at all.
It’s arguable that in poetry it’s ten times more critical, since that usually has strong limitations on the length and detail possible.
If having a nose ring says nothing about the character and isn’t used to further any point, it shouldn’t be in there. Those details matter because they’re the only clues the reader has to interpreting the story. If they don’t actually communicate anything, then it’s an ugly waste of time and detail which should be used in other ways, or cut entirely. You don’t need to describe everything about a character - but you need to make certain to describe any unusual of important details, and use those details in ways that show the meaning.
For an example, let’s take Lord of the Rings. There’s is - technically - nothing I could easily find which explicitly says that Frodo Baggins is about the same size as other Hobbits. (I could easily be wrong about this as I’m not going to re-read the entire trilogy before one forum post). However, it would have been disastrously, stupidly wrong for Tolkien to wait until page 200 of Return of the King to mention that Frodo was actually 6’7", even if that detail would not have specifically made any previous event impossible. Tolkien used his description of Hobbits to let us know a great deal about them, and including that detail, even if it’s a supposedly “neutral” one that changes the reader’s interpretation of events would have utterly destroyed what Tolkien called the “Secondary World”.
I didn’t use Tokien by accident, either. Consistency was key for him because the man fully understood that a good story absorbs the reader’s attention and interest until it becomes seemingly real. Making the reader do mental gymnastics to try and sort out the new reality, and what it means, breaks suspension of disbelief. Even for something as small as a nose ring.
Bringing all this together - and acknowledging I don’t know what book this is, much less read it - this is a dangerous detail. Even if “everyone” has nose rings, if it’s a detail that’s even brought up, it should be used to explain something about the character in question. It should most definitely have been brought up earlier. Second, the immediate question is this: “Even if this is a common social ornament, what does it mean to the character in question? Did he or she get one because it funny, or because the circle of friends got them? Did the character just think it looked good, or was it a childish rebellion? If it was rebellious, did the characters parents even care, and how did the character react to their view?”
So yes, this sounds like bad writing.
Different people want different things from literature. One reader’s desired trope is another’s ‘bad writing.’
I think p. 171 is a little late, but I first misread the OP as complaining that a detail waited until p. 17, which is easily early enough. Perhaps some of the other respondents are in the same boat.
Thanks for posting that, you beat me to it :). I actually find threads like that one and this one fascinating, they’re great windows into how differently we can perceive the same stimuli. I for one am not a huge visualizer, so Two Many Cats’ complaint has almost zero resonance with me - that scene wouldn’t have bothered me at all.
But that’s not to rag on you Two Many Cats ;). I get your annoyance intellectually - if I read fiction the same way I’m sure I’d be just as annoyed. And I strongly suspect we have little conscious choice in the matter, that this one is more nature than nurture.
Yes, if it had been on page 17, that would’ve done nicely, and I wouldn’t have posted this thread at all.
[Homer is telling a Hallowe’en story]
Homer: … So then his wife comes through the door!
Bart: So?
Homer: Did I mention that she was dead?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Well, she was. And she hit him in the head with a golf-club!
Bart: And?
Homer: Don’t you remember? He went golfing all the time and it really bugged her.
Lisa: You said he went bowling!
You left out the “D’oh!” That’s unforgivable!
In the book Bad Behavior, I forget the author, one of the short stories had a girlfriend yank out the boyfriend’s earring. There’s no mention of the earring before that in the short story. I know they’re not that uncommon. But I didn’t visualize it, until the story needed to mention it. That’s how its done, sometimes.
It is Schrodinger’s jewellery. You must simply imagine all possible forms of bodily adornment are in a superposition of both present and not present until measured.
Spoiler ahead for a 40 yr old Sc-fi story!
Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke
.
About halfway thru the book, the main character is revealed to be Black! :eek:
And a couple of subtle hints about him being bisexual! :eek:
I do remember that it caused me to rethink a lot of what I had just read in the first half of the story back when I first read it in 1976. :dubious: I think that was Clarke’s intention, tho.
Looking back, I remember thinking that was pretty cool. 