Today's post comes from having recently read Survival of the Prettiest by Nancy Etcoff, which I enthusiastically recommend to anyone because it's great.We all spend time describing what our characters look like. Their height, their build, their eye and hair color, the length of their fingers, the presence of a scar and so on. Chances are the more important a character is, the more defined their physical appearance is to you as a writer.
The characters most vivid in my mind are those from Oracle. They're also the characters I know the best and have spent the most time with. After envisioning them for so long, I can't imagine they could ever have looked differently than they do. I've been thinking about their appearances and what kinds of things I'm saying, both intentionally and not, about the character because of how they look.
So far, the one that strikes me the most is one who gets killed. In my mind she's always been a really slender gal with white-blonde hair and incredibly fair skin. Using Etcoff, the character's slim build and fairness are both indicators of youth (and therefore innocence) since a mature woman's figure is typically more filled in, and a woman's skin actually darkens when she has children. This character is also one of the few who remains a relative innocent.
For a quick run-down of some of the information from the book, check out this link.
While there's a lot more to a character's physical appearance than just how masculine or feminine they are, feminine or masculine traits have a lot of sway over how we perceive a character (just as they have a lot to do with how we perceive the people we see in real life). Have you ever stopped to think how a novel or movie would change if the main character had stronger feminine facial features? Stronger masculine features? Take a minute to picture a character you've created, pick your favorite. Got a clear mental image? Now, wherever your character lands on the masculine/feminine scale, imagine their features changed to more strongly reflect the other end of the scale. Hold that image and put the made-over character back in the story from which they came. Awkward fit?
1 comment:
Actually, I think it's interesting when books are made into movies and you're left scratching your head as to why cast *that* guy?
Some of the best casting ever has been in the Harry Potter movies (and some of that was flat-out luck with casting the kids so young). But the early Batman flicks took some flack for casting Michael Keaton and even Michelle Pfeifer as catwoman. In Inkheart, they've cast Brendan Fraser as the father--which I personally have no problem with, tee-hee--but I had someone more like Michael Douglas in my head while reading. It did change how I looked at the dad...
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