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I have no idea what anything in my stories look like.



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Tue Jul 03, 2012 5:02 am
Gringoamericano says...



This has been a problem for me since I first started writing. I cannot come up with what the people or places in my stories look like. I don't have much of a problem with world building, or coming up with different character personalities, but that's about it. Is there any way I can overcome this?
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Tue Jul 03, 2012 5:17 pm
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Rosendorn says...



Not everything in the story has to be described.

For now, let the story be written as it wants to. You might discover little details about the characters as you write that are important to the plot (Example- Character x has a scar on his forearm from falling in the woods that helps ID his body), or you might not.

When you've edited a few times, that's when you can start figuring things out. Let the personality and lifestyle of the characters determine what they look like; a hunter would look much different from a magistrate.

One thing to remember is people will picture your characters differently than you will, and they'll forget almost every description you give in favour of their own opinion (unless you constantly remind them of a key feature or two).

I actually haven't described many of my characters in my own stories. I leave it at their personalities, positions, and clothes (I consider clothing part of worldbuilding). A handful of times I'll describe features, but I try to keep it minimal. Yet, when I show my character references to people, they say "Yeah, I could picture them like that."

If I tell you a woman is a CEO of a fashion magazine, you'll get an image. If I tell you a man is an artist in the 70s, you'll likely see another image.

We have stereotypes already in our minds. Don't be afraid to use them. Shape them slightly, so it's a unique character, but people tend to do far more work on descriptions than you can— and should. Because reading lots of description on a character is boring.
A writer is a world trapped in a person— Victor Hugo

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Sun Jul 08, 2012 4:27 am
pettybage says...



Gringoamericano,
since you mention world-building, I guess there's a lot of stuff which the reader can't really automatically imagine on their own, without a description or two helping them along the way.
No problem: just mark the points where you believe a description should be inserted, and once you're you're done with everything else, fire up an episode of Rome, or Game of Thrones, or an older flick like LOR or Conan and start looking for stuff close to what you want to describe. And then look at it, and describe it.
While you're at it - look how people move. Play it slow motion, rewind, embellish. Modern technology has given you everything you need.
If now that you have enough material for descriptions, it begins to seem that the descriptions themselves are clumsy - no worries - just take a favorite book in the genre, and write down/copy-paste into a separate file all descriptions of people and places in say like 10 chapters. Once you see them lined up out of context, your internal description-producer will kick in.
  








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