The Green Knight's Quest

Hah. I meant to post this a while ago. Now I get to use it in a post without looking for something to share. Win.

aliettedb shares her character sheet for her main character and I took notes.


As a non-visual person who does not pay much attention to physical traits, tyical character sheets have always struck me as an afterthought - it's not something I need to know before I write a character and often something I write down when it becomes important. How tall someone is - do they look up or down on someone else? Do they need help reaching high shelves? Do they hit heir head when entering buildings?

In the comments, I added:

I'm having the feeling that this might be why so many writers are reaching for white characters: I find that I don't have the vocabulary to pick out features that would easily distinguish one black/Asian/other face from another. I'm not very visual at the best of times, but I've absorbed the 'western' vocabulary to a degree that I can fake it. When you have only a couple of POC in a book, it's easy to be sloppy (the black guy doesn't need more descriptors to be identifiable, however problematic the practice is. And now I want to go and make sure that every time I describe him I describe him _as a person_ whom you could pick out from a group of other black characters.)

And it just occurs to me that these character sheets pass up on a fantastic world-building opportunity: they contain the things Westerners notice: Height. Weight. Hair colour. Eye Colour. Clothes.
Smoothness of skin, for instance, has fallen out of fashion as a marker, calluses are never mentioned (and hardly anyone has them), scars are rare, and most people in Western countries have relatively even teeth.

So, I'm thinking what would people in *my* culture use to describe a stranger? A lot of the things we look for are status markers or perceived status markers: how rich people look, how privileged parts of the population look. So my people would probably not go for noses or facial shapes _unless_ there's a history of these things mattering, but how much a person eats and how much time they have to look after their bodies/complexion probably still plays a role.

I ended on

Hm. Must ponder *that*.

Well, I'm still pondering. I just feel that I've hit something important, one of the things that will help me to cross from writing generic stories to writing from a POV of deep immersion, because this kind of cultural detail - what do they notice, how do they judge where the other person is in relation to them? - is important. It's a bit like 'what would this person notice about a room? about a landscape? only adding another dimension.

And, well, I've _done_ this, I just have never done it consciously, and I could not have formulated what that _means_ for getting to grips with a different culture. And this probably is where the value of NaNoWriMo 2011 will lie for me: forcing myself to experimet at novel length with something new, to dive into a world that I don't know at all.

It's hard work. This is not an attack novel - I was briefly tempted to write one that was - and so it is slow (940 words today) (I also had other things to do.) This time round - it's a long time since I've written in a new world - I'm thinking a lot more about the culture of the place I'm writing in; and I'm trying to immerse myself even more strongly than I have previously done. And I can kind of see why people - myself included - aren't doing this all the time, and in great depth, because I spent an awful lot of today thinking about the _geography_ of my story and what cultural consequences it would have - how many people could live in my remote mountain area - oops, a stranger would be known - etc. If I wanted to write lots and lots and lots of words, I'd just have been reaching for the nearest clichee. And I suppose this will get easier once it becomes a habit - people who are immersed in the culture they are writing in will have it easier - but for me, right now, stopping and thinking is the way forward in order to have characters who don't just have a quick veneer of Otherness but are white stock characters underneath.

And dancinghorse will be pleased to know that there was no reason for my first POV character to be male. So she isn't (and opened up in response). She still has a wife, though...