Describing people, faces and bodies

[wanderwonder]

Er, what's a Guernsey? The name Phillip comes to mind, but I don't know if there's any connection.

My longest story posted to this site has almost no description of the main character. We know he's about six foot three, has short brown hair, hazel eyes, looks athletic, and some people think he's cute. And that's as far as I got during five chapters. Is that enough The thing is, when I started writing I didn't have an image in my mind of what he looked like, but I filled a few notebook pages on his personality traits. I'm working on the last chapter, so it would be pointless to throw in those physical details now, but I still wonder how to assign physical attributes to characters I don't picture in my imagination.

 

[Softouch911]

Lol, a guernsey is a milk cow.

 

[Penelope Street]

Now that is the kind of description I wish I could do for my characters.

Thank you.

I tend to cheat
I keep the description fairly vague, allowing the reader to create the imaginary person in their own head. While I do manage to convey the basics, I don't bother going into too much detail.

I don't think this is cheating.

An example. Turning she saw him standing there by the steps. She was struck once again how good he looked. Blond hair hanging down to his shoulders, a tan sports coat over blue jeans and a sport shirt. The blue/gray eyes that shone with intelligence. The cute little cleft in his chin. Jennifer loved the way he looked, even the slight bulge halfway down his nose, showing where it had been broken playing water polo in college.

I like the bit about the nose. Does Jennifer know how it was broken?

My favorite technique—and I say this with all due sarcasm—is the old "looking at myself in the mirror" technique. We've all seen it. Early in the story we want to know if the main character is gorgeous or an uggo, so they go to a mirror and spend a little time looking at themselves. They usually end up naked, cataloguing their other assets for the reader's sake, so that we know the exact cup and/or penis size of the character. I also hate stories that start off with "Hi, my name is Mandy. I have shoulder-length brown hair and blue eyes, wah wah wah wah." It's the mirror technique, only more blatant.

Maybe we should have a thread about moments at the mirror, which ones work and which ones don't. With examples, of course.

What I'd like to know is how we best describe our main character, especially working in first person. Do they spend ten minutes gazing upon themselves, do we describe them at all aside from general size, do we let other characters describe them? I'm starting to get in a rut with my writing, and would love to hear what others do.

My preference is to not describe a first-person narrator unless the character's appearance somehow changes the story- and if this is the case, there will likely be a natural place to include such a description. Often more important than a character's appearance is how a character feels about their appearance. ST's 'guernsey' example is a good one because it gives a little of how she looks, but a lot of how she feels.

 

[SavannahMann]

I like the bit about the nose. Does Jennifer know how it was broken?

Thank you for the compliment on the bit about the nose. Yes Jennifer knows how it was broken.In the story they have been working together for about six months, and Jennifer has just discovered his play room, a bondage dungeon. He laid clues for her to discover it, and it opens the relationship angle.

 

[Le Jacquelope]

Er, what's a Guernsey? The name Phillip comes to mind, but I don't know if there's any connection.

My longest story posted to this site has almost no description of the main character. We know he's about six foot three, has short brown hair, hazel eyes, looks athletic, and some people think he's cute. And that's as far as I got during five chapters. Is that enough The thing is, when I started writing I didn't have an image in my mind of what he looked like, but I filled a few notebook pages on his personality traits. I'm working on the last chapter, so it would be pointless to throw in those physical details now, but I still wonder how to assign physical attributes to characters I don't picture in my imagination.

Well, one of my characters is a guy on a Baskin Robbins run - he's on a quest to meet 31 different types of women. Fat, thin, redhead, black, Asian, East Indian, Hispanic, British, Japanese, Chinese, Somali, a woman gangsta from the hood, a stock broker, and so on. For the most part you're probably right about how to approach it, but in this case I can't see that working. In retrospect that kind of story would give me a lot of descriptive practice anyway.

 

[Tonguemeister]

What a Guernsey really is ...

Lol, a guernsey is a milk cow.

Well it could be a cow, or it could be a hand knitted jumper made of oiled 4 ply wool as traditionally worn by the fishermen and quarry workers here on dear old "Sarnia Cherie".

A "Guern" however, is a local born and bred islander!

 

[Softouch911]

Well it could be a cow, or it could be a hand knitted jumper made of oiled 4 ply wool as traditionally worn by the fishermen and quarry workers here on dear old "Sarnia Cherie".

A "Guern" however, is a local born and bred islander!

Lol, I just KNEW someone would catch that eventually. Yeah, it was originally an island off of Scotland.

I'm from farm country, so didn't think the reference was so unusual ... until I was called on it!

ST

 

[wanderwonder]

Well it could be a cow, or it could be a hand knitted jumper made of oiled 4 ply wool as traditionally worn by the fishermen and quarry workers here on dear old "Sarnia Cherie".

A "Guern" however, is a local born and bred islander!

Mayhap one of those islanders bears the monniker Phillip? Hm?

 

[Tonguemeister]

Mayhap one of those islanders bears the monniker Phillip? Hm?

There's lotz of Phillips here dude!

 

[Tonguemeister]

Lol, I just KNEW someone would catch that eventually. Yeah, it was originally an island off of Scotland.

I'm from farm country, so didn't think the reference was so unusual ... until I was called on it!

ST

An island off Scotland?? That's got me giggling!
Hope all's well in farm country.
B good 2 talk.

 

[sirloy]

An island off Scotland?? That's got me giggling!
Hope all's well in farm country.
B good 2 talk.

I wondered what you would make of the move north


S

 

[AsylumSeeker]

Complaining Is Bad Manners

Good question.

I've never really described my characters other than in very general terms like "tall" or "dark-haired." Must work, no one ever complains.

You know, I've been meaning to tell you...

 

[arturobraganza]

Asian women looks so innocent, but majority of them are wild

 

[Joseph King]

One tip I was given in describing any character is to avoid a police description i.e 5' 6" - Blonde hair etc... Having said that I'm guilty of it at times.

Here is my one Asian submission: I'm married to a Thai so I should know better...

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=249795

 

[Rob_mDear]

Simile and Reader Experience

I do think giving a good description of characters is important. Unlike many others, I think that readers want to visualize a character, but they'll be lazy, leaving the character as a faceless blob, if you don't do it for them.

With that said, I generally despise it when entire paragraphs are devoted to descriptions, although you have to do it sometimes, and sometimes it fits and it works. But stories with multiple such descriptions, expecially in a row, are factory made and tedious.

One of the first techniques I like to use is to scatter the description, seemingly innocuously, amidst the action. In one paragraph, she's brushing her long, black bangs our of her blue eyes. Some time later, he thinks about how her freckles have gotten darker as the summer has dragged on. Further into the story she raises her drink to her small, pursed lips, flushed with color.

Beyond this, what matters is that a reader fill in the blanks. They don't need to picture the character exactly the way the author wants them to, and they don't need to get every single feature described to them. Pick and choose, and go ahead and be vague. If you say that a character's eyes were the kind of golden brown you only see in magazines, well, I've never seen those kind of eyes in a magazine myself, but as a reader my brain manufactures a pleasing image and I go with that.

To go back to the original question, about oriental eyes. Everyone has seen oriental eyes, so they don't need to be described physically.

"She had the sort of delicate face that always looked so pleasing, to Jim, on any petite Japanese woman. Her features were almost doll like, smooth and soft and comfortable. But her eyes had a twinkle in them. They were dark, and inviting, with an exotic shape that made it hard for Jim to look away."

 

[EurasianRhapsody]

Most writers do that. I want to convey a very vivid sense of "wow, I wanna fuck that person. They LOOK hot (at least according to the words)."

well, i myself am half chinese... most people can't really tell but still. i think asian women are less curvy than most, like i am, but still sexy in a slim, svelte way...

i'd love to hear some of you try to describe me in that way... i'm probably not the most attractive person but it'd be fun for you guys to try out your writing skills no?

Edit: decided to remove those pics of me nude showing my face as well. would be weird if they showed up in my office's emails!

 

[cloudy]

well, i myself am half chinese... most people can't really tell but still. i think asian women are less curvy than most, like i am, but still sexy in a slim, svelte way...

i'd love to hear some of you try to describe me in that way... i'm probably not the most attractive person but it'd be fun for you guys to try out your writing skills no? here i am

Darlin', you need a sandwich in the worst way.

 

[EurasianRhapsody]

Darlin', you need a sandwich in the worst way.

i don't starve myself or anything - it's just my metabolism that keeps me lean

 

[CWatson]

Now that is the kind of description I wish I could do for my characters.

So learn how. Read some of her stories--read lots of stories, and study what they do. (I personally recommend The Great Gatsby for prose, no matter what the situation, but there are others out there of great talent. On SOL alone you have Ken Randall, Garrelhaz, Al Steiner... The list goes on.) And remember: Good artists borrow. Great artists steal. Or, to put it another way, rip people off until you can do it yourself. Or, to put it another way:

The way I measure the attractiveness of a character is through the reaction to him/her by the most trusted "character" in the story: the narrator. The words the narrator uses to describe his/her reaction will tell us a lot about the person, and the observation the narrator makes of the response the pretty one gets from other people tells us even more.

Softouch is completely correct about this. A lot of beginning writers fall into the mistake of trying to create, with words, a character who is objectively attractive--trying to paint, say, an Angelina Jolie or a Kate Moss purely out of prose. Not only is this impossible, you run the risk of offending The Reader by insisting that s/he find Angelina Jolie or Kate Moss attractive (I don't like either of them). So don't bother. Narrate from a character who finds the person attractive; let their words and descriptions bestow upon the beloved the kind of beauty that only love can lend. To misquote the movie Good Will Hunting: "This girl you met: she isn't perfect. What matters is whether she's perfect for you." Get to your narrator and then create a character who's perfect for them. And you're set. And suddenly you don't need to give an in-depth description of this woman's 38D watermelons; she's the most beautiful woman I've ever met, and no amount of statistics or measurements will change that. (And, in my head, she has a civilized chest size! )

 

[davion2308]

I don't

I go easy on physical descriptions and allow people to imagine their own characters. An athletic college coed with short, curly blonde hair and green eyes is enough. Let the reader decide on their own how big her tits are or how pouty her lips are or how long her legs are.

 

[a_bent_ampersand]

ab& sez

I'm not so sure it's about the physical description. The people I build you want to fuck because of a mystery inside of them or a danger about them.

I freckle everything with elements that make the reader "hungry" for next.

Blue eyes. Blonde hair. Black hair. Green eyes.

But what are they "saying" before the sex?

If I have an incredibly long description before me, I skip ahead to the dialog.

Hot dialog owns description for days!

 

[Sweat_pea]

Describing something such as the features of something like an Asian girl can be difficult and is easily over done if not done well. This may have been suggested elsewhere in the thread, as I haven't read all of it yet. But if your word usage is bland and poorly arranged then yeah, you're going to loose people's interest.

Features - I think, like feelings, sensations and/or emotions have to have a fluid flow into the reader's imagination. It has to be like a poetic steam. You can complete that stream as a crashing waterfall, or as a calm pool, a smooth satin sheet for the beds of poets and the reader in general.

You just have to reach inside. Maybe find a picture of some intensely beautiful Asian woman and look at it. Ask yourself how you'd describe that beauty from within the context of poetry meant only for her. What would you say, how would you say it? Especially if you thought she would see it.

Yeah, "She was a slant-eyed, yeller skinned goddess!" would probably not get your cheek kissed as much as slapped. Well if it was me anyway, lol.

Personally I like a good description. I like a good history of a character also. I want to feel as if I know the person(s) I'm taking the time to read about. Description, history, persona, are definitely important IMO to the structure of any good story, be it non erotic, erotic, or just strait porn, it's hard to get swept into it if there is no visual component.

Just my two cents. Good luck with it!

 

[Sweat_pea]

"She had the sort of delicate face that always looked so pleasing, to Jim, on any petite Japanese woman. Her features were almost doll like, smooth and soft and comfortable. But her eyes had a twinkle in them. They were dark, and inviting, with an exotic shape that made it hard for Jim to look away."

Yup - yup!

 

[nerk]

It's probably wrong to cite HP Lovecraft in a discussion of erotica, but I'm alright with wrong. The point being that he wrote some of the scariest fiction out there, and a great deal of his most effective description is talking about how you can't describe the thing, and then how it affects people.

The Colour out of Space is a perfect example. What is it? a colour. What colour? not one in our spectrum. So suck it up and deal, because this story is about a colour you can't visualize. The story is scary as hell because the colour does all sorts of scary crap, and then goes back to outer space.

In erotica, the same thing applies. You can go on at length and describe every freckle on her ass, but what will make the reader react to her is a few details that make her unique and the way the character react. Let the readers picture what they like, even if it means her nipples are a colour not found in our terrestrial spectrum. The Nipples out of Space

cue eerie music

 

[grey228]

In erotica, the same thing applies. You can go on at length and describe every freckle on her ass, but what will make the reader react to her is a few details that make her unique and the way the character react.

It's not how it looks, but how you use it.

OP - thanks for the suicide girls mention. I forget how beautiful they are.