Here’s my introduction of the character Pokey Dakota from PHOLUS REBORN – this is more physical description than I usually do, but in the context of this thread, I thought I’d share it:
I shuffled to the “Wait Here” line just as someone came into the store. I glanced up to see this beautiful boy who legit looked like he’d just gotten off the bus from Hooterville, he was so new to the city. Like he’d just gotten his Associate’s Degree from his local farmtown community college and now he was here in the Big City to set the world on fire in his clean, pressed jeans (belted with an oversized buckle) and stark white t-shirt! A beautiful thing, maybe twenty-one – twenty-two or three at most – 5’10”/ 5’11”, probably 180 or so, so lean, I’d have said skinny if he hadn’t had the muscle tone he had. (Maybe a swimmer?) But so sexy.
He’d probably been blond as a child, but his hair was more tan now, buzzed short on the sides, the rest hidden by his trucker’s style baseball cap that had a cartoon unicorn on it. He had lengthy scruff on his face, all the parts of a beard – sideburns, cheek fuzz, chin scruff, mustache – but none of them connected, so it was a fill-in-the-blanks beard. Bright blue eyes and a big pink lower lip that looked like it needed to be kissed to tell how soft it was.
There was an angelic sweetness to him that made me want to throw him on the counter and fuck him hard and raw right then and there.
That was not the thought I needed to have – my own monster came to life in my shorts.
For his part, he gave me the up and down, licked his lips, and whispered, “Damn!”
I gave him a gentle, flirty smile. “That’s funny,” I said. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
I don’t use much physical description in my own stories, simply because reading such descriptions doesn’t turn me on. The same is true for the description in the excerpt Absman just posted; I zoned out a little bit and started skimming down to what struck me as the “good bit” (in this case, the line “my own monster came to life in my shorts”). But even if it’s not satisfying my erotic tastes, I want to commend Absman on what a good piece of writing that passage is, because it’s not just a dump of descriptive details; it’s revealing a ton about the narrator (Pholus), what he’s feeling, and what turns him on.
After my big epiphany, I now write generally with almost no description, except for what is needed for the narrative.
I’m happy I took the risk and tried exploring. As someone who grew up with “blank canvas” style Heroes in JRPGs, I like the idea of the reader easier inhabiting my characters without skin colour, hair colour, and — within reason — even age, being a stumbling block.
I now consider it one of the few things about my writing that I’m very happy with generally.
I think about this quite a bit when planning a story.
It seems to me that there’s a common expectation from readers, that characters are described enough to not be faceless and interchangeable, and that this should be done early on rather than making a jarring appearance halfway through a story. However I try to avoid making it too formulaic and change it up in different stories. The ‘breadcrumbs’ approach as mentioned by Derek Williams helps to keep things varied.
For first person narrators, I think the most natural way to provide their description is for them to describe themselves in relation/contrast to one of the other characters. “Unlike my best friend Danny, a typical athletic jock type, I’m much more interested in writing erotic fiction than working out, and it shows.”
Logically, I feel that it should depend on the individual story. If the narrator is someone who notices other people’s appearances then they will be more focused on describing other characters, etc.
Also, it’s hard to increase the diversity of characters in my stories unless I make an effort to describe characters with unusual attributes/features. This is something I feel I need to get better at.
For my games (2nd person narratives) I naturally take more of a ‘blank canvas’ approach.
A little tip I have for 1st person is;
describe the hero describing a change they’ve only just noticed in themselves. This helps ‘the medicine of exposition go down’ because in real life, people typically only notices their own aesthetic when it changes.
“I looked in the mirror at my pale Caucasian face and neat beard. My dark eyes were piercing, as they always are.”
NO ONE, looks at themselves or describes themselves like this.
I don’t look in the mirror and “pause to take in my chubby Irish gingerness, and impish confidant grin”.
I would look in the mirror and “notice I had gone from chubby to fat, from lockdown; It was a little depressing” or
“while brushing my teeth I looked twice at the space between my nose and upper lip; a massive spindly white-grey hair poking out of my neat moustache, why god why!? I’m only 29!!.I spat the tooth paste out and examined my face closer”
etc.
The added benefit is you get to get some character in as well; The ‘change’ the hero notices sneaks in the physical describing of the character, without contrivance, but then you also get to write the character’s reaction to the change, is he upset, stoic, angry, happy, proud, mixed, etc., and what does that say about his personality.
I think that, as a writer you have to decide what is the correct form for your subject.
No-one is worried about reading literature on a porn fetish site but a good, well structured story with decent basics in description and narrative can help people along quite well. If you get my drift.
As writers we all want to let the readers into our worlds but we also have to let them use their imaginations . That’s the point.
Also, edit what you really don’t need and Show don’t Tell.
I think porn writers get far too specific with character stats and appearance. It’s almost always done as an information dump, and would be far less obtrusive if it was exposed during the natural course of the story. Additionally, if it isn’t pertinent to the story, then it needn’t be said that Joe is 5’10" or 6’3". I think it’s better to give a general description (tall and muscular) and leave fleshing out many details to the reader’s imagination.
I don’t need stats, but don’t want it also left to my imagination. If a character has a big cock, I want to know it’s big. I don’t have to read how many inches, but want to hear about how it’s larger than other characters, and how he has to deal with its size. Same with height or muscularity. If a character is tall, I want to hear how he has to look down at other characters or they have to look up; how he’s intimidating or however else his height affects things.
Often in stories that don’t do the stat dump, it’s mentioned somewhere maybe that the character is tall or has a big dick, and then never mentioned again ever. In a story with just one character that might be ok, as then I only have to have one mental model/image at the forefront. If there’s two or three characters, then I have to juggle more. If there’s a full cast, I’m tired and don’t want to invent what everyone looks like and then remember it.
All excellent points. Load us up with descriptive prose, but not a listing of their stats. When I see a guy I sure don’t try to figure out how tall he is in feet and inches. I’ll just remark to myself that he is tall or short. And if he’s in between, then it doesn’t even cross my mind. Likewise for dicks, they’re either two handfuls, too small, or just right. Of course, everything is in the eye of the beholder, but you get my drift.
I agree - physical description always needs to be sprinkled in gradually, and then only enough to give the reader enough context to allow their own imagination to flourish. You can also do this in subtle ways, like in name selection. John vs. Jamal vs. Jose vs. Jimmy all evoke different races/ages, just in one word.
“John vs. Jamal vs. Jose vs. Jimmy” - reminds me of one of my bugbears of having multiple characters with very similar names or all starting a with the same letter. If they’ve all been introduced in a brief infodump then I’m almost certain to get them mixed up.
These are also the stories where the author seems likely to confuse the names of their characters!
I had meant to express that an author can chose ONE of those names for use by their character, and then the reader makes inferences based on qualities we associate with those names.
You can do the same with alternatives of one name, for instance (Andrew / Andy / Drew), for instance.
Is this a difficult thing to do (picking names)? I ask only because I’ve never really done it; I write heavily based on real people so I just rip first names straight from real life, lol.
For me, finding the right name means finding the character. More I think it’s easier for the reader to remember if the name is distinctive, or alliterate, or symbolic. But that’s how I end up with characters like Pokey Dakota…
(*Pokey Dakota is from my upcoming novel, PHOLUS REBORN)
Hahaha. Hey, it’s descriptive; it works. It’s just a fascinating glimpse into another way of writing because I think about it so little. I suppose I consider the name such a given in my writing - like, there’s already a name chosen for me - that I shape out a character regardless; a name is just a little sticker you put on him.
To the extent that I have picked out names, I usually just look for the most common names and choose almost randomly. Jake and Zach (Zack? I don’t remember) from my story The Show were just two randomly generated names, and I only renamed them because they were based off the same real people as a previous story of mine and I didn’t want that to be obvious, lol. Jason Adams from Judgement Day was also randomly generated.
For side characters I also like to go with real life names if the side character is also based off a real person, and if they’re not, I just go to the trusty old random name generator. I probably abuse that more than anyone.
I like playing with the characters concept of self through their name. Picture “Al”. Now picture “Alex”. They’re very different people. And though the middle aged man walking along the beach might be Al, after he finds the magic rock on the beach, he makes a great Alex.
