Bonus points if the author first mentions a specific trait, physical build, or whatever else halfway through the novel and totally fucks up my mental image.
I don’t expect a biology model description for each character, but write me something brief and evocative of how they should look, you fucking dork author. I don’t even know how tall she should be, her hair colour, anything. Why are you like this, author?
I believe character descriptions became a big thing in the time of physiognomy – when Balzac narrates someone’s physical appearance, he wants you to extrapolate the character’s personality from that. Physiognomy fell out of fashion and if there is no other motivation to provide a description, like signalling someone’s class position or injecting a bit of lyricism, it’s simply economical to leave it out. To provide a counter-example, Mary Gaitskill always writes exactly one paragraph of description in her short stories which you can just skip because it’s not properly integrated into the story as a whole.
Read Raymond Chandler’s novels and you’ll get vivid descriptions of everything except what the fuck is going on
because it usually isn’t necessary for the story
Death to America
Idk, I read a lot and this is never an issue for me. Is it really such a hassle to reconstruct your mental image of something? I’m constantly considering and imagining characters as different builds, dressed differently, sounding differently, depending on how the context of the scene paints them. And by the end of the book I have a pretty firm mental image of what the character is like, born of a thousand iterations which finally and slowly merged into a cohesive whole.
You can just tell me what a character looks like down to the specific material of the buttons on their shirt, but that loses out on a certain amount of speculation and imagination. If a character who has so far had no reason to perform extraordinary physical feats suddenly finds it necessary–and possible–to lift an immense object, for example, my mental image is like “oh wait so he’s jacked” which introduces a kind of ‘twist’ entirely in omission.
It’s not a massive hassle I guess, but I would rather have something firm to construct the mental image in my brain around, I guess. Plus sometimes context of the scene can paint characters in ways that contradict how I read them, subjectivity.
Again I’m not asking for detailed biology class models or tailor’s receipts, just more than literally nothing. I like when I can glean details from the narrative like the strength example you give, but lots of novels don’t even have that, y’know?
