DESCRIBE CHARACTERS AS YOU GO ALONG

In previous posts, I’ve railed against too-specific physical descriptions of characters, asking valid questions like, “Who cares what color her eyes are?” I’ve also given examples of short paragraphs of character description tightly tied to the in-the-moment emotional response of the POV character. Next, a great example I just ran across in the novella “Bodies for the Wax Factory” by Arthur Leo Zagat in the November-December 1938 issue of Strange Detective Mysteries.

Take a look at this and notice the author is doing exactly what I recommended in terms of keeping description immediate and POV-tied, but instead of describing each character in a paragraph, he’s spread that description out over the course of the whole short scene in which an insurance investigator meets a beat cop. I’ve added bold for emphasis. Check this out:

 

He held the yellow flame in the cup of his hand a few seconds, giving Officer 728 a good look at his blunt-jawed, knobbed, almost brutal countenance. His high cheekbones threw shadows that hid his eyes.

“Yeah,” said the patrolman. “Couple hours ago you had to battle the mobs on the sidewalks if you was going anywheres. You couldn’t hear yourself think, for the noise of the trucks. Now it’s only a little after eight, and if I was to drop this night-stick you’d think a blast went off.” The man in the derby sucked flame into the cigarette he held between his thin lips. He was watching the officer’s expression with close attention.

“You’re new on this post,” he remarked. He flicked out the match, and against the glow of the street lamp at the Eighth Avenue corner, his gray-suited body bulked chunky and powerful. “This is your first night, isn’t it?”

“What’s that to you?” The officer’s grizzled face tightened into suspicion. He’d been tipped off that a lot of phonies cruised the Twenties. The dingy silent loft buildings around here held millions of dollars worth of furs, and there were plenty of crooks who would like to tap the vaults that held them—crooks with brains, not like the dime-a-dozen flat workers in the Bronx. “What difference does it make to you?”

The man’s teeth showed in a tight smile. “No difference at all,” he said softly. “Except that I like to know the cops working the neighborhood.” He let smoke drift out of his wide nostrils. “And I like them to know me.”

“Why?” the patrolman demanded, muscles knotting across the back of his shoulders. His face, the color and texture of old leather, became bleakly expressionless.

The man shrugged wide shoulders. “I’m around here all hours. Sometimes I do queer things.”

 

No idea what color their eyes are? That’s because, as I keep repeating, it doesn’t matter—unless, of course it does matter—to the story. A sense of these two as fellow tough guys? Done. Exactly how tall they are? Nope. One of them has a bit of clothing or an accessory—in this case a hat—that sets him apart? Derby mentioned. And in the meantime, we now have our two main characters and the setting in place, and in this case, right at the beginning of the story.

Do this!

—Philip Athans

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