First things first: An apology to the writers of Moana 2. Turns out they already realized that whole “we’re adding a lot of plot threads here!” problem but, well, they did that on purpose because it was supposed to be a series originally. They knew what they were doing! You can put a lot of character development and stuff in a series as opposed to a movie! And then the people in charge came in with a sledgehammer and they had to put together the pieces in a much smaller format, which… doesn’t always work well. Or that’s how I’m reading the situation. I’m sticking with my original analysis though; expanding the crew was a great move for a series but just couldn’t hold up in the length of a movie. I guess at that point you’ve already hired actors though so… A messy situation all around, I suppose.
Anyway! I’m actually here to work on descriptions! Again! Did I mention I’m terrible at describing how a character looks when I introduce them. I feel like I’m decent at character work though so I’m going to describe characters in the voice of another character. First up, Nadia to Dennis and Dennis to Nadia from Chasing Stars.
Nadia came into the office and saw Dennis sitting at his desk, shuffling papers as he looked for a particular one. His hair glinted as the silver, growing increasingly prominent among the black, caught the light. He wore it long and braided down to his mid-back; it was almost unfair how much easier he had with his long straight hair than she did with her own.
“Ha!” Dennis exclaimed, holding a paper in triumph. It was the hand missing most of the pinkie, though she rarely even noticed that any more. “Thought you could hide from me, eh? Got the monthly report for the Bridge, Nadia.” He smiled, his brown-green eyes turning to crescents. His face seemed made for smiling, as the motion folded the tanned-leather of his skin right on its creases. It was odd sometimes that his face bore his age more prominently than her own father’s given that he was a decade or so the junior, but Dennis’s face was more open and friendly because of it. Probably also had something to do with the fact that her father was the more likely to spend time applying creams and ointments to his face while Dennis was the one you’d actually run into in the forest or under someone’s porch easing a badger out. His comfort in himself showed in Dennis’s clothes as well; he wore them all like a second skin, whether it was the green coveralls they wore for work, his everyday t-shirt and jeans, or the few occasions she’d seen him in formal wear.
“Well, that’s it. You ready for a job? It’ll be a good one,” Dennis said with a mischievous grin that lifted one corner of his mouth. “Apparently this school lost a few hamsters, and now there are quite a few of them in the cafeteria.” He grabbed a jacket and swirled it around his shoulder. The sun glinted off the earring Brook had given him at their wedding. It was gorgeous; a polished marble feather that curved against the edge of his earlobe. Nadia wasn’t courting anyone and even if so, wedding earrings weren’t her tradition, but the striations in the marble had sent her looking for pendants more than once. She’d actually buy one one of these days when she convinced herself she could pull it off. They buttoned up against the weather and headed out to the car.
And let’s flip this around! Dennis is looking at Nadia now. It’s been a bit since I’ve been in these characters’ heads! I feel like I’m trying to remember a furniture layout I used to know. I’m probably setting a few chairs in the wrong places and adding a plant that wasn’t there before, but eh, these aren’t canonical.
“Drat and blast you!” Nadia said as she ducked under a table. Dennis chuckled. The little black-spotted hamster hadn’t hesitated a moment; as soon as it got its feet free of her hands, it had leapt for the floor like a base-jumper. Nadia went still, moving slowly and carefully up behind the hamster that had taken a break to nibble on an abandoned cracker the janitor had missed. She pounced and came up triumphantly, dark-skinned hands cupped carefully but firmly around the errant rodent. “Yes, sorry little fellow, I know it’s scary,” Nadia said as she walked to the center of the room. She dropped the hamster into a bin they’d set in the center of the floor, bottom covered in wood shavings and a cup of water in one corner. There were six hamsters there right now of varying sizes and coloration
Dash it all I’m describing the hamsters better than Nadia right now. Refocus.
Nadia scanned the cafeteria. As she looked back and forth, her curly black hair bobbed. It always did, especially when tied in poufs like it was now. Dennis had once or twice ribbed her that it even bounced when she’d braided it. She’d rolled her eyes but smiled, and Dennis was glad. The way her hair seemed animated and cheerful suited her personality. By the time she moved in, she was coming out of her shell but Yelena said when Nadia had started researching with her, Nadia had been really reluctant about sharing her opinions. Not that she didn’t have opinions, and strong ones, but sometimes you had to watch her for that narrowing of her brows or tightening jaw to know she was internally telling you how much of an idiot you were. Especially if she thought of you as an authority figure, but Dennis was pretty sure he’d disabused her of that notion by now.
“You gonna catch any of these little guys or just stand around supervising?” Nadia called, ducking to look under another row of tables.
“I’m getting there,” Dennis responded. “You know these old bones just make me so much slower. And bending over? Oh, what a luxury for young people.”
Nadia looked over to stare at him to make sure he saw her exaggerated eye roll. Her eyes were a dark brown, warm and usually sparkling with energy. Especially when she and his daughter Trillium got talking about magitech and robots together. Watching Trillium and Nadia together was a study in comparisons. Nadia was shorter and curvy, carrying more weight, but never in a way that got in her way. Trillium was more like himself, straight and tall and about as curved as a ruler. Their hair was the same- short and curly for Nadia where Trillium’s was longer than his own and plaited into straight ropes that landed right around her waist. But their brains and their enthusiasm for their creations sparked together like two perfectly-meshed cogs. He thought of them like salt and pepper; so different in color, style, and flavor, but working together in perfect concert. He tried to encourage them to spend time together without being pushy about it because Nadia was the kind of role model any parent would want for their kid. Including this one, he thought, focusing his attention back on the task at hand. Nadia’s little gadget* had done its job well, scaring the hamsters out of their hiding places so they could stop up the hidey-holes and scoop them up. Here was a mother hamster carrying two small pups.** He rolled them gently into his hand. The mother tried to bite him but unfortunately for her, he was familiar with rodents and always wore his gloves. “Nadia, they’re really feisty!”
“Yes, well, we are driving them out of their homes,” she said, crouching by the bin as she put another hamster in. It turned from side to side then scuttled under one of the pieces of cardboard they’d put in. “Don’t worry, little fellows, we’ll get you new homes with fewer excited human child feet.” She stood, dusting her knees. Dennis so was accustomed to seeing her in her work clothes that it was something of a mental adjustment every time they met outside of work when she was wearing her normal clothes; usually a snug undershirt with a top that hung off one shoulder, with a jacket over all and soft pants. Her main requirements seemed to be that it not get in her way when she was trying to work close-up on a robot’s innards.
I think that’s enough; Dennis is much more wordy and wanders a lot. Or maybe that’s just me. I also went too heavy into story.
*You don’t get to know what gadget it is because I just know there is one, not what it is or does. So there.
**I think pups is the right word for baby hamsters but don’t really want to verify. So instead I’m taking more than the time it’d take to do a quick internet search to tell you I’m not going to take that time and search.
Nadia and Dennis as I imagined them on HeroForge a while back. I wasn’t satisfied with Nadia’s clothes so I shook things up. Finding or making reference images for your characters is, to me, very helpful.
All right. We’re going to Astronautica now and we’ll focus on the main two for book 1; Jason and Oroo. For those of you familiar with the original Argonautica/Jason and the Argonauts, you may be familiar with the role that Jason plays as leader of the Argonauts. What you may not know is that his best friend is a bluebird who is also female and Orpheus. Look I made some changes, get over it, the point is that I’m going to basically ask them to just straight up describe each other.
Okay, Oroo, describe Jason.
Well, he’s human. He’s got that roundish face on top of that really wide neck they all have. I’d say Jason has a firmer face than many of them, with kind of sharp corners at his chin. He keeps his hair a little longer than a lot of human men, kind of just long enough to flop and be a little messy. Between you and me, I think he preens it a lot. And this is coming from a bird. He has kind of some hair growth on his chin too which I think is on purpose because it’s always there but supposed to look like it’s not on purpose. His eyes are way too white on the edges like all humans and kind of olive-gray in the middle. Silvery a bit, I guess. I think someone called it steely? He’s got those giant teeth and he keeps them white and straight. I saw a human man once who had missing teeth and some that were crooked and it made me think a bit too much of something trying to eat me so I prefer Jason’s straight teeth. He smiles a lot but also I know he’s nervous like almost all of the time about what other people think of him or if he’s doing things right so I think the smile is on purpose to make people think he’s not nervous. He’s pretty tall, but I guess a lot of humans and most of the nemeans are taller than him. But there’s only like one or two ornithans I know who are taller than him, and they mostly carry it in their legs and necks. All the humans pretty much have shades of brown on their skin but his is on the light side. I’ve heard other humans call him bronze but honestly, bronze is way more brown than him. I will say I’m jealous of those long fingers humans have. It must be so easy to play instruments with them. Don’t tell Jason I said that, and never let him touch my [[instrument]].
The instrument is one of the things I’m worldbuilding. It’s like a lyre though, but altered to be played with one bird foot or has switches on one side for chords and strummed on the other side because the ornithans (the bird people) have a thumb on their wings that… you know what, you don’t need to know all the worldbuilding now. I will tell you that the nemeans are the lion people. Guess why.
I’ll also tell you I decided that species names aren’t capitalized because we don’t capitalize human so let’s keep it consistent. Anyway….
Hi Jason! Tell me about Oroo. Start with appearance please.
Oh, Oroo? Well, she’s, uh, she comes about to here on me. That’s shoulder-level since this is a word-only medium. She’s kind of… well, first off, she’s a bird. I mean an ornithan. She’s one of the first non-humans I ever met, did I tell you that? Right, description. But it’s important you know that because she’s got feathers and they’re all blue. Like, sky-blue. All down her back and tail and her wing-arms. Except for her belly, where she’s… well, she’s still blue on the top of her belly but it gets really pale the further you go until you get to right near her legs where they turn all white. And her legs and her thumbs are really dark black, kind of shiny. Not as shiny and not as black as her eyes, but a lot more than mine. Her toes are really long and jointed and she’s got claws on the ends of them and her thumbs that really look like they could hurt if she wanted to. Well, the thumb claws are kind of, like, filed down to be smoother so she can play without them sticking. When she spreads out her wings she takes up so much room. And really, you don’t notice she’s short because she’s so good at talking and presenting herself that she always feels like she’s on top of whatever room she’s in. She’s got a beak, too. It’s more mobile than most bird’s beaks, or near the end it is, so she can make more sounds with it so she can talk. Or, well, talk in several different languages. She has her [[instrument]] with her pretty much all the time. And she uses it like a weapon, I tell you. She sees what she wants and she pulls out that [[instrument]] and she gets it.
My reference photos of Oroo, the mountain bluebird, and of Jason, some random Greek guy I found online.
So a few notes. Hopefully the descriptions evoked character in both the describee and the describer. If we’re doing something in-story, things should serve more than one purpose. Bulk out the world, the interactions, the relationships, etcetera. Otherwise you end up with Victor Hugo describing the sewers in Les Mis; probably interesting to some people but for most readers they’ll tune it out and flip to somewhere more interesting. Tuning out is not the reaction we’re looking for in readers. I probably wouldn’t describe the characters this much in an actual story because, as we see with Dennis, it gets pretty rambly, or as with the Astroargonauts, it’s just a long paragraph of telling. I do want to be better at describing people more often because otherwise people don’t have their picture in their head (my writer’s group kept forgetting Nadia was black unless I mentioned it while talking to them which ain’t how that’s supposed to go).
Secondly, I leaned a bit on comparison here. It’s helpful, as Dennis noted. We all do it ourselves; people can tell you that comparison is the thief of joy but I’ll say that’s only when we make judgments while we compare. I want Nadia to be built on heavier lines, yes, but that doesn’t mean she’s out of shape or even fat. She’s just, well, rounder. But if I describe her as round, it sounds like a value judgment. (And if I describe her as curvy too much, it can sound like Dennis is making eyes at his co-worker but he is in fact thoroughly devoted to Brook and likes Nadia as a friend.) So I bring up Trillium. She’s a beanpole, Nadia’s not. Hopefully I did it in such a way that illustrated both without making value judgments on either. That’s the goal. Especially in this book where I’m trying to paint a kinder world where, for example, the whole of humanity isn’t trying to make the whole of humanity constantly feel like they have to have body issues which they then project onto everyone else. An exaggeration, but sometimes it can feel that way.
Hope this was interesting and illustrative. How does one end a blog post? How have I been doing this for a year and still don’t know? In case you can’t tell, it’s getting late as I’m writing so I need to sign off before I really start going off the wall.
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