Describing Characters, Revealing Characters

Sometimes writing workshops/seminars/whatevers sound like you've found yourself trapped in some hoity-toity cult of writers trying to sound deep, speaking author-speak in the most exclusionary way.

Advice like, "Don't simply tell us about the character, allow it to be a revelatory, transcendent-but-earthy experiencing of the character's inner..."  ack, I'm gagging and can type no more.

As always, I'm just sharing my thing.  It could be wrong and awful, who knows, but it's how I do it.  My first rule when introducing the reader to a character is to avoid being corny if I can help it.  Worse than corny is cheesy.  I'm not sure why the connection to food in those expressions, but I try to avoid them both.  Not in real life, though, because cheese is magic. 

While many say that describing a character's attire is a great way to give insight into the nature of the person, their societal status, their likes/wants/personality...I generally try to avoid it.  There are some exceptions, in my opinion, but describing an entire outfit as if the readers might want to order it for themselves is tedious.  It takes me out of the story, and I suddenly feel like I'm trapped in the author's living room, the author's voice drowning out the story.

I have to side with Mr. King on this one, and say that the less said about the character's clothing, the better.  Some clothing items I don't mind?  A hat with a sports team logo, shoes with stiletto heels, a crown, wellies.., these are examples of minor additions that do a lot of work.  But "he was wearing a tux, Tom Ford, with structured shoulders and a swooping shawl lapel" takes a lot of space and does so little, except insert the author's voice into the story with all the finesse of a bandsaw cutting through sheet metal.

I mean, leaving clothes out of it, in Twilight, the author never even describes the Bella kid, except to say she's bad at volleyball.  Bella is our vehicle in the story, and if you describe her clothes, height, weight, hair color, nose shape, eyes, teeth, etc...every item you add you make it more difficult to slip into the character's skin.

Those of you who curled a lip at genre fiction, no matter how much more money she's made than you, we can find the same sorts of examples in literary fiction as well.  I've never been a fan of The Great Gatsby. Yeah, I said it, and yeah the book outsells my books, so what.  But here's the thing...Daisy is such a 2-dimensional character that the most we really know about her is what she's wearing, and that she is an affront to feminism everywhere.  

Which maybe was intentional, because all the women in that novel are basically furniture that the men, portrayed as much smarter and more decisive, fight over.  Daisy is a clothes rack with a two-color floor-length gown, with a collar like flower petals, and she wears white gloves. F-Scott-F even describes her earrings as large and flower-shaped, but there is no real understanding of who she IS.

You know the whole "show don't tell" thing? When it comes to revealing a character to the reader, I think listening is better than seeing.  What a character SAYS is far more important than what they look like, clothing, body, etc.  It's just as true as it is in real life.

Give the characters stuff to say that reveal who they are.  Then we get to hear the character's voice, instead of the author's voice, and we'll get to know them.