Details, details...

Today’s question: How soon do you reveal character details? When, in your novel or story, does your character get described?

To answer that question, I’d like to consider another. What does an undescribed character look like? Do we as readers just assume the character is some standard, generic person? Do we assume they are like us, our age, our skin color? Do we leave a blank space for them, holding off picturing them fully until we get the necessary data?

Certain traits should be revealed early, I think. It is significant, for example, if the character is a child. The world treats children differently and their capabilities are different. And, as a general rule, you don’t want to surprise the reader by revealing critical information about the character too late in the game.

Unless, of course, that is precisely what you intend to do. A particularly subversive example is Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. At home among his people, the title character Ged is just another person. It is only three chapters into the book, when he travels to the Isle of Roke, that the narrative happens to mention that Ged had the red-brown skin of “most folk of the Archipelago.”

You have to remember that the book was written in 1968. Starting off with the revelation that most of the characters had brown skin could well have, at that time, made it a book about brown-skinned characters. But it’s not. It’s a book about wizards. It wouldn’t really change anything if they were green.

Which brings up another point -- what is necessary data about a character and what is not? Skin color is very relevant if you are writing a story about the Watts Riots, but might not be important in a futuristic or fantasy setting. A character’s gender is usually revealed the first time a pronoun is used for them, but I’ve seen books where the author has cleverly avoided pronouns all together to conceal this information. The character’s age usually impacts their place in society, but which is important -- the societal status, or the age?

As usual, bringing the questions up for consideration is more interesting then finding any one perfect answer. After all, the answers change with the needs of the story.