Writing Stuff (Publishing Opportunities, Contests, Tips, Jokes, Etc)

Appearances: Character Complexity, Colors, and Complexions

Look around you. The world is full of color. So what about your story?

Often times, writers tend to either fall into one of two categories.

The first category is composed of authors that put too much effort in describing the visuals of their stories, but in all the wrong ways. This group tends to focus on writing every little detail about a scene and it detracts from the flow of the story or just comes off odd and clunky. They spend too much time telling you that so-and-so is 6'2 and a quarter, or that their suit or dress was of this brand and this design, that their eyes were the bluest blue or greenest green that you've ever seen. You get a scene where, often in the character's pov, the MC looks in a mirror and sees themselves and lists all their typical features: eyes, hair, hair color, HEIGHT(?), CHEEKS(?), shirt, shoes, shoe size, etc etc.

But they already see that stuff daily so why is today a day to mention it all?? plus, this takes up 3+ paragraphs (or one giant one) and pauses the whole scene. It's clunky, cliche, and bogs the story down.

Then you have the camp that doesn't describe anything or if they do, it's very vague and you have no clue what the character looks like aside from their blonde/brown hair, square jaw or heart-shaped face, and abs if it's wattpad (🙄).

But what other features do they have? What's their unique face? How do we envision them? Not asking for you to give every single detail like above, right down to the exact measurements of their hair and what brand of jacket they wear, but give us some details.

On wattpad, a lot of writers feature characters from their own backgrounds, and that's fine. I wrote a post about more diversified characters before, but I understand people want to write about who they're more familiar with. So by all means, write about your Arab, Desi, and African characters. Good on ya! And go ahead and write about your white characters too -

unless it's another cliche billionare non-Muslim American/Italian/British guy who abuses and controls the poor girl from whatever Muslim majority country and she falls for him or another story about the brown girl who says ew to "all" guys (but mostly brown guys) until she meets blue/green eyed, blond haired, Handsomejock McWhiteboy and falls for him and he converts for her...

Don't write those stories. Those are bad stories. Go sit on timeout.

No, but really, I've ranted about those stories before so I'm gonna cut this one short.

Anyways, write your characters from whatever racial/ethnic background you want (as long as you're not writing with the notion that xyz is superior or inferior to abc). Cool. Great.

But be diverse in writing them and treat them all the same. What I mean is, describe them and show them to us, and don't make any background the default. For example, here in America, it sucks but people tend to think or act like white is the default and everyone else needs a tag to them.

So when you read a story, the characters are portrayed as whatever variation of white until a specific detail is mentioned about their ethnic background. Until you hear that Samantha was Carribean, or that Kevin was half Vietnamese, they're basically some stock image of white in people's mind. Body size and such depends on if the author described them, so yeah you might know that Kevin was kinda chubby, or Samantha wore glasses that hung loosely on the bridge of her nose, but you're probably not imagining them with too much detail other than a generic outline.

And then also, telling their background is NOT sufficient detail either. Shocking news: NOT EVERYONE OF THIS OR THAT BACKGROUND LOOKS THE SAME.