So, what of character development in your story? Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Our character, let’s just call him John, is the main figure in our story. Now, let’s introduce him; first in a grossly, unnecessarily, over descriptive manner.
“John was a tall man, well over six feet, who was proud of the fact that his tanned face did not show the years of hard labor he had performed on the family’s southern Indiana farm. His thick, wavy, blond hair blew in the breeze as he peered across the forty acres of Sherman’s Hybrid corn. His steady, steel blue, eyes, surveyed each stalk looking for any sign of disease or hampered growth. He snagged his blue pinstriped, bib overalls as he jumped down from the old, red and gray, Ford tractor and crouched down to recover the wide brim, woven straw hat – you know the ones with the little green, transparent window in the front of the brim. Dusting off the old, sweat soaked, hat he said to himself, “Don’t look like rain today – guess the weatherman was wrong again.””
Sorry, give me a moment, I just nauseated myself. Ok, now, what has just happened is the writer’s taking away the imagination of the reader. This description of John seems to project the writer’s assumption that their readers have never seen a farmer, a tall handsome man, a Ford tractor, or even a gardener’s hat.
This is a trap many authors fall into. You have a mental picture of your character already painted in your mind. However, unless you plan to include a physical rendering of this character, such as an illustration or photograph, your reader will not see him as you do. By attempting to describe every detail, you are taking away one of the reader’s portals into your story. Basically, leave some things, especially if they are not relative to the story, to the reader’s imagination. This will actively involve them in the story, and more often than not, they will come from the reading with a greater feeling of “being there”.
Let’s try this on for size.
“John, still sitting on the tractor, surveyed the expansive corn field for any sign of disease or hampered growth. The years of work on the farm had not diminished his good looks, but the draught would not be so kind to his crops. “Don’t look like rain today.” He said to himself, pushing the straw hat back on his head.”
Ok, so as a reader, here is what happened.
In the first description of John, the reader’s mind was forced to leave the story to create the image that was being painted. The writer was giving every little detail upon which to paint a new image that would then be stored in the reader’s mental library.
In the second description of John, we were only told he had ‘good looks’. What the writer simply did was say, “enter good looking man into your mental search engine”, and our mind automatically does the rest. So we mentally do not have to leave the story to create a new image, but we have, instead, drawn an image, from our experiences, to be the character of ‘John’.
Speaking from personal experience let me say this. In my recent book, Infidel, I have the characters of Lucian, Asher, Anton and Bihjan. I created these characters, but can only tell you what one of them looks like, and that is Bihjan, simply because I drew him from characters played by the actor Oded Fehr. The others…I honestly do not know what they look like, as I supposed myself to be each one during the writing – but that is a topic for another time.
The long and, hopefully, short of it. Don’t tell the readers too much, just tap into their imaginations and experiences and let the story be an individual experience for each reader.
