Trouble Visualizing Characters

When you're reading a story - do you ever just have trouble seeing the characters or visualizing what they look like in a scene or anything?

What do you do when/if you have this problem? Just a little poll.

 

It depends on how skilled the author is, and my response applies to both fan-fiction and pro-fiction.

Sometimes, the author just bobbles a scene, and I?m not quite sure what the author meant. I reread the scene a few times, until I figure out what the author probably meant. And sometimes, I?ll be reading, and I?ll realize that the reason I don?t know what?s happening is just because I don?t care. At that point, I usually stop reading, at least for a little while.

The English Patient, Wurthering Heights, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban are the only three books that I?ve started that I never finished. The writing style is what turned me off from Wurthering Heights, the narrative style and lack of interest in the characters are the factors that led me to dump the English Patient, and it was general annoyance with the world Rowling created combined with lack of interest in most of the protagonists that led me to dump Harry Potter. I realized in all three cases that I had no interest in the books, and I was only boring myself further by continuing.

 

While I don't agree with Gandalf's choice on HP -- -- I do agree that when you're not imaginationally involved with a story, sometimes the best thing to do is just stop, unless it's been assigned or you're an editorial assistant; it's not engaging you, and life's too short to read bad stories. (Says the chick who actually got all the way through The Approaching Storm and now feels like she should have taken her own advice.)

That said, some of the older stuff that just might take some getting used to might require a little extra effort. In those cases, I look for the "door" -- for me, the "door" into The Scarlet Letter was seeing Dimmesdale's little embroidery project. Once I had that, I got the story, and the rest of it cleared itself up in my imagination.

If you're talking about a story that you're generally into but just kind of cool on one character or confused on one scene, check back through. Sometimes the author accidentally left something out, sometimes your eye just skipped a line that explains how you got from point a to point b.

If you're just having trouble seeing a character... well, I tend to give them faces of people I've been in classes with. There's a poor guy I sat in three classes with in college who I don't think ever knew my name who's been Asher Lev, Ansset the Songbird, and a host of supporting characters in other stories. He just had a really interesting face. A girl whose name I don't even remember has become Rosie Cotton. A soap actress I switched onto one day became a character in a book I was reading that night. And so on.

 

When I write a character, I do it one of two ways:
- I'll describe them in such a way that they HAVE to associate them with the same exact real-life figure I'm associating them with. Either that, or it's really obvious as to what they look like, such as 9-LOM, or a "stormtrooper"

- I'll intentionally make them generally ambiguous; I find that readers can associate better with the story if I hand them a generic character ("female, average height, shoulder-length brown hair, slender") and then let them fill in the blank in their head. Sure, everyone's image of the character is different, but everyone's image of the character is "personal".

 

Actually, detailed descriptions can get rather irritating. General descriptions often are better if tied with character development. While reading Elaine Cunningham's Daughter of the Drow and Tangled Webs I found myself fascinated with the main characters. No great physical detail, but enough that coupled with her depiction of Liriel and Fyodor I came to really care about them (and didn't agree with the cover art on either book about what they looked like). Sooo... If you just can't "see" the character it may mean the author hasn't given enough depth to him or her for you, the reader, to care about. Just my two cents.

 

Syntax, if I didn't know better (or maybe I don't ), I'd say you had just read On Writing (by Stephen King). That sounds very similar to something he wrote.

 

A lot of people have written that general advice.

 

KnightWriter:

Nope -- never heard of that. Is it a book, an essay, an article, what is it?
I AM a King fan, though, and have read a lot of his books (personal fave: 'The Running Man', under the pseudonym Richard Bachman).

 

On Writing is Stephen King's part autobiography and part lesson on writing. Great book, and it covers many areas of writing. The paperback edition came out in May of 2001 (although I got it not too long after it came out, in hardcover), and is a good deal.

 

Hm, alright. I'll see if I can find it at the library next time I'm there. Thanks for the heads-up.