How important are Physical descriptions

[alohadave]

That's like saying Marilyn Monroe isn't gorgeous, just because she's dead.

Not to kink shame...

 

[Bramblethorn]

I've only heard of Teri Hatcher, and she was pretty much Generic American Brunette, so no idea what the others might add to the mix.

I feel like even if I knew what all those actresses looked like individually, I'd struggle to picture the composite.

 

[Britva415]

sounding like a catalogue entry

or instructions for a police sketch artist

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

I feel like even if I knew what all those actresses looked like individually, I'd struggle to picture the composite.

Which is why I don't use names as comparisons in stories. But I know what the composite looks like in my head.

 

[liliput1]

'Carolyn looked like a mix of Wendie Malick, Teri Hatcher, Angie Harmon, Terry Farrell, Janice Dickinson, Joan Severance and Julie Strain all tossed together.'

Doesn't work too well, does it?

No because now I’m imagining Terry Farrell, Teri Hatcher, Joan Severance and Angie Harmon tossed together…

Ahem. I’ll be in my bunk.

 

[Katie_Mae]

I thought the lit lore was that readers are unable to become aroused unless you describe your characters' physical appearance and the whole "no, less description is better" stance was just a reaction to that by people who don't enjoy reading about someone's physical appearance?

At any rate, it doesn't matter which was first and which was the reaction.

They're both wrong. But, also, they're both kinda right.

I think the not-so-helpful advice can be boiled down as such:

Lit law: Everyone is the same.

Reality: Everyone is quite different, actually.

Now, by "everyone is the same" I don't mean the lore is that people think everyone is exactly the same. I mean readers are here for different reasons, looking for different things, like different things, and writers are here for different reasons too, and this sometimes gets forgotten.

It's true, there are some people who need physical appearance to be described to become aroused. There are others, like me, who don't. I don't know what most of the characters look like in many of the stories I enjoy, or if I do it's often only the important or major details. (Unless the author draws an actual picture, then I can see what they look like. Or if the book gets made into a movie or something.)

Words of character description don't "build a picture in my mind," my eyes skim over them and my mind doesn't retain most of the details of appearance. If a story is very heavy on character description, it might not bother me, or it may encourage me to put it down and try something else. Which is fine, not every story is for every person.

Moving on... when the arousal happens is different. I've read here that some people masturbate while reading stories which to me is rather wild. But hey. Different strokes for different folks.

Moving on... not everyone is here reading to get aroused. I'm often not.

And then, it's not just the readers who are here for different things and reasons, us writers are too. What we're intending to get out of posting stories here will impact both out behaviours and measure of success. What you should do as a writer to achieve your goals, is very different from what I should do.

Last time a similar topic came up ^^

A person's physical appearance isn't important, unless it is. For me, when a person's appearance is important it's not the visual that's important.

To take an obvious example: It's not the look of a guy having too cocks I care about, it's imagining what they'd both feel like inside me.

The appearance of the female character doesn't matter at all for eroticism (for me). But it might for characterisation. If a character feels insecure about the size of her breasts, it's not the look of the breasts that matter, it's her insecurity and how this impacts her decisions/behaviour etc. The breasts could be big, small, doesn't matter.

And most of what I've said is about me as a reader.

As a writer, I am aware that some of my readers may care more about these unimportant details than me, so, out of courtesy, I do try to remember to include them. I have taken to drawing my MCs so at least I know what they look like, however any facial feature descriptions remain beyond me (I have a form of prosopagnosia, and yes, that obviously impacts my drawing of faces too, and IRL etc)

If someone requires detailed character descriptions to enjoy a story, then they'd be better off reading another author. That's the great thing about Lit, it's so big, we can each write or read in our own way and readers will find writers and writers will find readers. We don't need to try to write to the norm or average just to find an audience.

 

[FrancesScott]

This excerpt (from my own work published here) is laden with description, but it’s at least intended to shed as much light on the narrator’s psyche as the appearance of the FMC:

In not more than twenty minutes, the distinctive dark blue silos of my dairy destination appeared over the newly decked tree-tops. The lot was a turbid tumult of parked and parking vehicles; ones generally suited to the accommodation of families. The good weather had clearly prompted the same idea in others as it had in me. But I nevertheless found a slot and joined the lengthy line in the shop. I must have been the only person not to be accompanied by their kids.

There were two servers behind the counter. Taking orders, filling paper cups, erecting edifices of infeasibly high ice cream based on sturdy conical foundations. The boy - he was obviously a boy, he looked like a highschooler - had curly hair and glasses; his complexion lent weight to my estimation of his age.

The woman? Yes woman, I had hesitated, but it was the appropriate nomenclature, if perhaps a title she had acquired only recently, and wore with some uncertainty. I thought I knew her. It had been three years since I had been in these parts for anything beyond a mandatory and fleeting Christmas visit, and yet I was convinced that it was her.

Her brown hair was threaded through the back of a battered Mezny's baseball cap. Below the peak, her face was round, her friendly smile guileless, and her nose and cheeks smudged with many brown blotches. There was something almost cartoon-like about her appearance. Her features were maybe a little too large, and a little too unbalanced, for classical beauty. But there was an immanent, though intangible, aspect to her; maybe as simple as an all too rare warmth of personality. And she exuded an air of being genuinely pleased to serve her customers.

She wore a pale yellow, chocolate stained T-shirt. But this was not what drew my perhaps overly attentive eye. With an obvious suppression of guilt, it was her black athletic leggings that engaged my attention. Or - trying to live up to my late father's regular exhortations to honesty - what was underneath the tight material. While the featureless flatness of the front of her T-shirt was inconclusive, the curve of her hips and the pertness of her butt spoke loudly of emergent womanhood. And when she bent to select a waffle cone from a low shelf on the rear wall, it was beyond my meager will not to stare.

Many years ago, I had reached an uneasy accommodation with myself upon the subject of scrutinizing the female form. I apprehended that I was a mere man. My sex was, perhaps cruelly, programmed to do just this. The weak justification I made to myself was that this tendency was simply part of being male. My rule was, it is fine to look, to enjoy looking, so long as it never veers into intrusiveness. A convenient rule, I freely admit.

I considered it was when things went beyond simple appreciation that intentions devolved into the macabre and outré. Secure in my rationalization, I looked and I appreciated. And I told myself to guard against any inappropriate escalation. Still, as the line moved forward, I found myself hoping that the curly-haired boy would serve the family of four in front of me.

 

[GuiltyCowboy]

They are super important to me. Both as a reader and a writer.

When it’s successful, it’s because the physical description draws some delight. Just as physical appearance draws delight in real life. And it conveys some quality about the character - their youthfulness, say, or their taste in clothes.

The way they smell and the quality of their voice is important too.

This type of physical description is especially important with erotica, I find.

It’s one of the main drivers of my own erotic imagination, one character being turned on by the physical appearance of another (and therefore, one hopes, the reader too).

As such, the physical descriptions - and the qualities they convey - are a sine qua non of the writing being erotica.

 

[anthrodisiac]

The way they smell and the quality of their voice is important too.

This is an interesting point. Almost everything here has been about their physical appearance. But physical description can be more than that. I've been using scent a lot in my stories to get kind of a more animal texture to my anthros, and realize I'd been more or less neglecting smell as a dimension to my stories for years (mostly because I don't have a good sense of smell and it's not something I notice all that much). How a person feels, their texture, is also another physical dimension. How they taste. Been employing those a lot, too, given how much variety of form I get to play with.

 

[GuiltyCowboy]

This is an interesting point. Almost everything here has been about their physical appearance. But physical description can be more than that. I've been using scent a lot in my stories to get kind of a more animal texture to my anthros, and realize I'd been more or less neglecting smell as a dimension to my stories for years (mostly because I don't have a good sense of smell and it's not something I notice all that much). How a person feels, their texture, is also another physical dimension. How they taste. Been employing those a lot, too, given how much variety of form I get to play with.

Totally. When you wrote 'how a person feels', I misunderstood it to mean the 'feeling you get from someone's physical attributes' and not literally their texture. But I think texture, smell, voice, physicality all create that person's feeling.

And I want to know that feeling and that's why I think physical descriptions are so important.

And then, from that, you can make your plotting more effective, or meaningful, because you have a stronger sense of the character.

 

[anthrodisiac]

Totally. When you wrote 'how a person feels', I misunderstood it to mean the 'feeling you get from someone's physical attributes' and not literally their texture. But I think texture, smell, voice, physicality all create that person's feeling.

And I want to know that feeling and that's why I think physical descriptions are so important.

And then, from that, you can make your plotting more effective, or meaningful, because you have a stronger sense of the character.

Those kinda details also play into some of the actions and considerations as well, serving more than just giving a better sense and picture of the person. For me, writing non-human bodies, it's little touches like that that help add extra depth and verisimilitude to the story and the world at large.

For example, the MMC in my series gets a fluffy, blubbery titjob from an anthro seal (seal fur is incredibly soft and fluffy when dry) in chapter 2. In chapter 3, when he tells his zebra friend about it:

"Jealous. I got bristly zebra hair. My titjobs are like rubbing your cock with a brush." ... "I've had complaints," [Abeni] grumbled.