A professional writer once criticised a short story of mine, saying I don’t provide a sufficient physical description of characters when I introduce them. I disagreed with a lot of things this writer said, and much of them I entirely dismissed out of hand as either a profound difference of opinion, or simply as arse gravy (no, really – this person had a lot of frankly balmy notions about how to write a story. I’d be grateful to anyone established who took the time to respond to something I wrote, but this was an example of two people living on entirely opposite sides of the field). But the comment about physical descriptions stuck in my head for some reason, like an increasingly disliked dinner guest who wouldn’t leave. It probably wouldn’t have done if this person hadn’t been published and awarded several times.

I hardly ever introduce my characters with a physical description. I hardly ever describe their appearance at all. Sometimes, if it’s singularly relevant to the story in some way, I will. Most of the time however, it hardly occurs to me. My heroes and influences on the other hand are mixed. Reading my very gratefully received pre-release copy of JPod this morning (thanks Mr B!), I noticed that Douglas Coupland usually doesn’t. He might occasionally mention something like one of his characters is unable to drive with the window down because the sun on their arm affects their eczema, but I don’t think that’s the same thing. Alternatively, having just finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I was reminded that Haruki Murakami often does. His novels however are a sort of 21st century, more surreal Raymond Chandler, where the femme fatale could come out of her retirement without looking faded or out of place. Hard-boiled crime novels of Chandler’s day are all about the long physical description of the female protagonist, usually from the leg up, that you hear muttered out of one corner of the hero’s mouth as he puffs an internal monoglue whilst chewing on his cigar.

I tend not to however. I prefer not to. A person’s character shines out from who they are, not what they’re wearing. Physical attributes of a person are a bit like make up and perfume, a bit like gift wrap. Plus if you’re going to give a description, you should usually give it straight away – as soon as the reader encounters that character, else they will develop their own mental image based on how they talk or act or move. Problem is, it’s not always appropriate to give an immediate physical description of someone. Sometimes it’s just boring to vomit an unnecessary catalogue of clothes and hairstyles onto a page. Other times it’s quite contrary to the way you want to introduce them.

If you leave a character without explicitly assigned physical attributes for long enough (not very long at all though) then the reader will always assign their own. This is how the brain works – it catalogues and remembers by images. There is nothing more irritating than having developed a mental picture of a person to have that then scratched away with a tardy list, not only entirely contrary to the image they created themselves, but just seems incidental and thus scrappy as a result. The whole effect jars with the reader, and shoves them back a little from something they should feel increasingly drawn into. It certainly does with me anyway. When you sit down with a novel, you automatically enter into a tacit agreement of trust with its author. The author trusts you will be patient with them, and the reader trusts the author to give them a good and credible story – that they will lead them by the hand through a world where they are steered towards one particular place, but are free to look around and focus on whatever they wish whilst they do. If you go to a gallery or museum, you do not expect to be ordered exclusively what to look at, or be told explicitly what a piece of art is meant to reflect. Art is all about personal response. It’s about using one’s own imagination to empathise and comprehend what the artist has created.

Message is everything. It’s the atoms, the oxygen, the Holy Ghost of a creative work. If the point of a story is all about people living without focus, living half-lives in a ghostlike state of routine, duty and tired acquiescence, then I think a bare minimum of the aesthetic is an intentional preference, if not an ideal. It’s about voice. There is no formula for making a piece of art. There is no checklist of components to assemble. Life is simply not created in this cold and clinical fashion.

And frankly it’s all, fundamentally, about imagination. It’s all about ‘show don’t tell’. If you must have a physical description of everything and anything that appears in a novel, then you probably shouldn’t be reading a novel. You should probably be watching television.

I very rarely notice a person’s physical qualities when I meet them. Sure, I might notice they have brown hair and are between 5’5” and 6’ – unspectacular average statistics like that that tell you absolutely nothing about who they are and how life has shaped them. But the things I notice tend to be those that make them shine out as an individual. As a character. They might look somehow sad whilst they’re concentrating. They might have a scar close to their left eye – just a tiny one but deep enough to have marked their face for the rest of their life. They might smell somehow like warm cotton sheets. They might speak with a quiet voice, perhaps one used to being spoken over if it spoke too loud. They might have beautiful hands or intensely sexual ears. They might eat with their mouth open or pick their nose unashamedly. They might whistle when they breath. They might stare somehow deep into you when they look at you. They might, just maybe, be something more than a pair of faded jeans and a grey hoodie, a short crop of brown hair and a pair of hazel eyes. What does that tell you about a person anyway? It tells you nothing.

This is all a rant. This is all a loud and irritable attempt to justify myself to this voice in my head that won’t go away. This is me asserting myself and saying “I know how to write something, I know how to make a complex and holistic and harmonious universe from free thought, and I don’t need a list of physical attributes to introduce the people who live within it if I think it’s unnecessary.” This is me articulating a reply to that tiny seed of cancer that was sewn in my head several years ago that I quietly gave food and filthy water to, simply because the person who told me is a successful and established author and I am not.

This is me taking on self doubt, one demon at a time.