Tag: description

Musings

[Blog] Front Range Summer

Faith Hakimian

The summers here are beautiful.

I notice it most in the mornings, I think, when the light is still golden and gentle. You can tell even then how hot the day is going to be, whether the temperature will simply coax and encourage a population already drawn to the outdoors to spend as little time between four walls as possible or if it will edge into something more heavy and oppressive. At least, until the afternoon.

Those who have lived here longer say this isn’t how the summers usually go, with storms rolling in and claiming an hour or two in the late afternoon for impressive shows of rain and thunder and lightning. It’s not every day, but some weeks it seems like it happens more often than not. Familiarity doesn’t make them any less stunning. Not when you feel the thunder as much as you hear it. Not when it shakes the walls of the house that seemed so thick a moment before.

The hills and plains are still so green. Full of tall, thick grass, feathered at the top and almost silvered. It moves in waves with the frequent breezes. Here and there some other plant has turned a dark and brownish red, painting contrast through the fields. And the sunflowers! And the columbine! The one standing in long ranks here and there, all tall and yellow. The other scattered and blue along this hillside or the other.

The summers here are beautiful. I’m so glad I’m here.

Musings

[Blog] Character Descriptions (and how I’m bad at them)

Faith Hakimian

So, recently I’ve come to realize that I’m actually pretty bad at writing physical descriptions of my characters. By which I mean, mostly, that I forget to do it. Because a lot of times I have at least some vague idea in my head of what my characters look like. Probably not as solid an idea as I ought to, but then, that feeds into the whole “bad at writing physical descriptions” thing.

On the one hand, I don’t think this is the end of the world, because even if I never say what color hair someone has, as long as I can reliably tell (or rather, show) you how they would react in a given situation, then I’ve at least got things moving in the right direction. For example, it’s far more important to know that Miranda’s first instinct is to punch a problem in the face (as opposed to, say, attempting diplomacy) than it is to know that she has brown hair. Which she does, by the way!

On the other hand, though, neglecting someone’s physical description while writing fiction can make it harder to fully and consistently flesh out a character. A character whose height tops out around five feet will quite literally view the world differently than one who is six-foot-six. They also might find it easier to hide in crowds. Or more difficult to convince someone that they’re a threat. Given that, it’s hard to argue that a character’s physical appearance is actually unimportant at all.

Which, if I follow my own logic, probably means that I should put a little time into actually writing down what Tanner and Miranda (and all the rest of my cast) actually look like. Because at the moment, I think the only thing I have written down in any of the stories is Miranda’s height.