: Re: How far into a story can I go until not physically describing main characters becomes really weird? I'm writing a Third-Person POV Fantasy, and I want to publish online, but I can't give a

@Kristi637

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It's important to remember that the characters live in your head, but they only are present in the reader's consciousness to the extent you place them there through your words. As a writer, I also dislike writing physical descriptions, but as a reader, they are very helpful in helping visualize a character. When a physical description comes in a book after you've already formed a mental image of a character, it can be jarring if it doesn't match.

When you don't include a physical description, you're also dependent on your reader's own cultural context to fill in the blanks. Right now, in America, I'd guess (unscientifically) that the typical "generic" narrator would be a white male in his twenties or thirties, probably dark-haired. If your character doesn't match that description, or if you're expecting to be read outside that cultural context, you might want to make sure you call that out.

It's worth looking at a few recent controversies around this: When the character "Rue" was played by a black actress in the first Hunger Games movie, there was an outcry, despite the fact that the author of the original book had always envisioned the character as black. She is actually described that way in the book, but subtly enough that many readers missed it. Similarly, Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea was adapted for the screen twice, and both times the dark-skinned main character of the book was re-envisioned as white-skinned, much to the author's displeasure. Again, the descriptive cues are there in the book, but subtle enough that readers missed them.

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