As an editor, I have always been really concerned with whether or not the readers would be able to hold a picture of each character in their minds. I stand pretty opposed to the trope of looking in a mirror or comparisons to celebrities to describe the characters (Wow, she thought, standing in front of the full length mirror in her bedroom. I look exactly like Jennifer Hudson, except I have a chin dimple! We could be twins!), but I support working their physical characteristics into the text somehow.
As an author, it was much less important to me! At the time of writing the story, I was much more concerned with getting across the characters’ personalities. What do I care what people think they look like?
(Kat and I did, though, have extremely specific pictures of the characters in our heads. We are method writers; we know who is queer and who is not; we know who is a person of color and who is white; we know who went to college and who did not bother; we know all!)
Readers know what Allie looks like because she’s on the cover of the book. (Actually, her skin is less pale in the book than on the cover! But, yeah, she’s white, with darkish hair, and wears a pendant with the Seal of Solomon on it. She’s not anywhere near as thin as the woman on the cover of the book, though.)
When I wrote the novella we ultimately based Salt and Silver on, I had a very specific picture in my head of the character of Ryan. I knew exactly what he looked like, down to the glint in his eye. Yet nowhere in the book is he concretely described for the reader!
I did a search for the phrases “Ryan’s eyes” and “his eyes” to see if we ever even described them. Ryan closes his eyes, and rolls his eyes, and there’s sympathy in them at one point, and later in the story they are sad, hot, lost, uncertain, and filled with something Allie’s never seen before.
(Okay, now I am laughing. I would like to do this with every book I’ve ever read! I actually both love and hate books in which eyes do amazing things, like crawl across the room and bore into people’s souls and jump from one person to another. Just picture a pair of eyes jumping around, and you will never read a scene like that the same way again!)
Anyway, his eyes are “hooded and dark” and have “tiny lines crinkling the corners” — but most of the time? Most of the time Ryan has pulled his Stetson down over his eyes so they are hidden.
We don’t describe his hair. We don’t describe his skin. We mention that he’s taller than Allie, but not how much taller — but we do say he’s shorter than Owen. We describe his scars more than his looks (and, come on, that’s pretty hot!).
Maybe this is a shortcoming, but I don’t think so. I don’t think so because it means that someone can read the book and picture whoever they want in the role of Ryan — Jensen Ackles or Taye Diggs. Or John Cho. Or Sendhil Ramamurthy, or Kirk Acevedo. Or whoever!
And that is awesome.
