Rules made to be broken, #712

[ksmith]

docbrite discusses the dreaded mirror ploy in this post.

By this point, I think most aspiring writers have probably been advised not to describe a character by the hackneyed technique of having him or her look in a mirror.

FWIW, I've used the dreaded mirror technique. In LAW (although by the time that scene rolls around, you already know what Jani looks like), and in INCIDENT. Frankly, if your character is alone in the scene and you want to get their description out there asap so the reader gets an idea of who they're reading about, it's as good a ploy as any.

We'll save the argument as to whether the reader actually needs any description at all for another time, OK. For the record, I am pro-description.

docbrite is not the only writer I know who has condemned the mirror technique, btw. CJ Cherryh has, as well.

Further on down the post:

Here's a new take on that: describing one by having her not notice herself in a mirror, so presumably we're getting the reflective surface's point of view:

(Me--During this non-reflective description, we read the following: )

"She was five seven, with a beguiling heart-shaped face and blond curly hair that flowed past her shoulders. Her trademark black turtleneck and jeans were nicely taut over the curves of her otherwise lean, athletic body. She wore no makeup, but the impetuous sparkle of her blue eyes attracted more men than would the application of any product from Bloomingdale's cosmetic counter."

And that's where I think the problem is. I am not pro-- this sort of description. The tone is off-putting. The style. The individual who would describe herself like this might make for an interesting study in narcissism, but I doubt that's the point of this particular scene. Many women who are fucking gorgeous don't see themselves that way. Some do, and that's a character tic that can be exploited. But in this case, it seems as though this is the protag, and her personality disorder is not a plot point. She's playing this straight, and damn, she looks good. No hint of "if I don't quit with the chocolate cake, I'll need a winch to pull up these jeans...five more pounds to go...damn it, where did that stain come from...meeting with the boss at 3--I shouldn't have worn jeans." None of the underlayers that often come to the surface when a person looks in the mirror. Nothing but flat, self-congratulatory checklisting that brings out the urge to bitchslap.

I'm a proponent of the non-description description. I try to use them sparingly, but I use them. It's like a Philips head screwdriver. Not the only tool in the kit, and not one for every job. But when you need it, you need it.

My Mirror Scene, from INCIDENT. Not patting myself on the back here, but note the difference:

Jani walked to the nearest sink and activated the tap. Savored the spill of warm water over her hands. Activated the soap, lathered, and rinsed. Counted to three, then looked in the mirror.

Her eyes stared back. Green nearly as dark as Delmen's brown, green unto black, the color of the bottom of a well.

She bent closer and examined the shiny white sclera. Still white. No gaps. No splits. Not much of anything, really. No blood vessels. No shadows. Fake white, to match the fake green. Eyes from a bottle. She reached into her pocket, held her breath as she felt for the vial of filmformer, exhaled slowly as her hand closed over it. Her shield. Her security. The one thing that allowed her to maintain a pretense of humanity.

Jani films her eyes. Every so often, she needs to check them. She does so by looking in a mirror. She confirms her normalcy and moves on. She does not describe her height to the fraction of a centimeter, or the taut fit of her clothes. No impetuous sparkle here. Instead, we get what's running through her mind. Her fears. Her reality.

So, I think The Mirror Scene, if used sparingly, has a place. It gives you a chance to get into the character's head and convey a lot about their backstory in a comparatively short time. I will use it in the future. I will do so sparingly, but I will do so if it kicks the story forward. If someone calls me on it, I'll shrug.

Comments

[wood-dragon.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I don't see scenes like yours as a hackneyed technique of having him or her look in a mirror. It's what Jani does. Part of her character and something that made total sense to me.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

But even though I see the point of the scene and the technique, I have to keep myself from lumping it in with The Dreaded Mirror Scene (tm). Because when it comes to rules and advice, you often need to follow up the "Don't Do This" part with an "...except when..." part.

[slave2tehtink.livejournal.com]

That first one is something I would expect from, say, Harlequin Romance novels. It's a cheap and easy technique that does nothing to advance the story, but makes a certain variety of brainless reader all twingly (I assume that's why they do it).

Just as irritating as The Dreaded Mirror Scene(tm) (speaking, here, as a reader who tries not to be brainless) is The Scene Where One Character Describes Another In His Or Her Head. I mean, ok, I'll give the author one of the tips off a gold sticky star for at least TRYING not to just insert random description but please. I don't think I've ever looked at another human being and thought explicitly about that person's looks, yanno?

My favorite character descriptions from authors tend to be evocative and sort of vague, for instance it may be mentioned that the character in question is a big guy, but not give us his height and chest measurements. If a detail is important to the story then by all means, fill me in, but otherwise I like the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes with an author letting me color the blank spots, as it were.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

If a detail is important to the story then by all means, fill me in, but otherwise I like the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes with an author letting me color the blank spots, as it were.

Readers, and in this I include writers-as-readers, tend to insert features that press their own buttons. I have an expressly blond character that one friend insists on seeing as a brunet, and a gangly character who another reader sees as stocky. I do my best. Once it hits the shelves, it's out of my control.

[affreca.livejournal.com]

As a reader, the primary message I get from your passage is not Jani's looks, it is her constant worries/paranoia. It tells me what I really want to know about the character.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Which is an example of what a mirror scene can accomplish, because more often than not, it isn't about the looks.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I have in fact seen (unpublished) fiction, written from the perspective of a female character, that describes said character down to her cup size.

Invariably, said fiction has been written by men.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I wasn't going to bring that up, but I did wonder if the author was male. Many of the examples I've read where female protags see themselves as hotties are written by men. They're describing the woman as they'd see her, not as she'd see herself.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yeah. There's something particularly male-gaze-ish about that kind of approach.

More broadly, though -- description of the pov character really is a problem. I get the outlines of Lune placed pretty early in Midnight Never Come, because she puts a glamour on to make herself look human (thus affording me a good opportunity to describe her in detail), but Deven's much more difficult. By the time I have an opportunity to show him through anyone else's eyes, we're nearly thirty thousand words into the book, which is way too late.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

It can be a problem.

I have two POVs in ENDGAME, Jani and the idomeni female, Rilas. I get past the description thing by having Rilas feel disgusted over her appearance, and compare the way she looks with the way she thinks she should look. Near the end of the chapter, she sees an image of Jani Kilan, and describes her in much the same way.

crzmslmaven is right--you don't need every detail. Just enough. A quick sketch. The reader can/will fill in the rest.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking I'll get around it this time by playing up the appearance-consciousness of courtiers; Deven will have thought long and hard about how he dressed to meet the Queen.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

And to my surprise, the scene was apparently written by a woman, which could mean we've slipped from "describing the woman of my dreams" to Mary Sue.

[alexandra-wolfe.livejournal.com]

I've only used the mirror description once, in a communal shower scene where my character looks at herself in confusion, unable to see what those around her see.

Like you, I find this works well when you are trying to offer up different perspectives.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Le sigh. It's not a Rule, it's a Warning Flag. (sorry...I get so pissed off about everyone talking about "Writing rules and how they should be ignored" which is stupid, stupid, stupid. If we stop thinking of them as Rules, then it makes a lot more sense.)

Warning Flags are those things that newbie writers are advised to avoid because they're soo hard to do right and so easy to do wrong. The "character looks in a mirror" scene is hackneyed and boring and utter crap--when most people do it.

The trick to this particular pitfall is to have some purpose to the mirror-looking, something other than an excuse for the writer to stop and load in a bunch of needless description. You're including worldbuilding and characterization. You're not describing things that the reader doesn't need to know. It's all about the eyes, and specifically how Jani's eyes are not normal, and what that means in the context of the world and the character.

This is the Right Way to use a mirror scene. But it's not that "a mirror scene" doesn't have to be bad. It's that sometimes the way to build character, world, or plot involves someone looking in a mirror, or at a picture of themself (Zelazny, in Nine Princes in Amber). The problem is that most newbies don't understand that the reader does not, in fact, need to know right at this minute the police-blotter description of the POV character.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I sorry you're pissed. I'm feeling a little shirty myself at the moment.

I really do believe that rules/guidelines/suggestions are made to be examined and, yes, broken. Ignored. Toyed with. If a newbie told me that they had written a scene where a character looked in a mirror and described themselves, I may read it and if it fell down at any point, discuss why I think it did so, and how it might be made to work. Or not.

It's all very individual, and that's why rules/guidelines/whatever bother me. They're blanket condemnations/warnings, and if you as a writer take them to heart, they may prevent you from trying some device or another that otherwise might work out just fine. Because devices can be overused, or badly used, by both newbies and more experienced writers. But other times they get the job done, serviceably if not brilliantly. And every once in a while, they work quite well.

Moving farther down, how is your explantion different than the one I wrote, beyond the fact that I called my scene a mirror scene?

(The checklist passage that docbrite cited came from a book written by a veteran thriller writer who gets published in hardcover. And she's still doing it and getting away with it. Could mean she's lazy. Could mean she's a newbie-of-the-mind, with solid cred in the field she's writing about, but a definite lack of experience when it comes to crafting fiction. Which is neither here nor there, but kind of interesting all the same.)

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I realize I sound argumentative, which is silly, as we're in agreement on the basic principle of the thing, which is that having a character look in a mirror isn't intrinsically wrong, and we also agree on what sort of thing makes it work.

It's my reflex after spending so many years shepherding newbies over on the OWW discussion list, to not ever want to see the world "rule" applied to anything in writing. There's something about the word that brings a huge pile of associations and makes people get crazy: either they start spouting it like it's an unbreakable commandment, or they take it as some sort of "you can't tell me what to do!" challenge, and neither of those reactions is productive. Neither of those reactions leads to someone understanding what's happening at the bottom of the causal stack.

Writing "rules" are kind of like eccentricities in an orbit: they're an indication that something else is in the area. But that alone isn't enough, and too few writers replace one "rule" with two more: "This is the right way to do it, and this is the wrong way." That's just more rules-memorization, and no understanding of the mental constructs behind it.

Behind what are so glibly called rules are mental constructs more like natural laws, inherent in the way we process language (specifically English; I suspect the same holds in other languages, but I don't speak any of them well enough to know). A string of sentences too alike in rhythm will bore the reader. Readers are generally bored by long lists of anything. Too many abstract nouns and verbs are dull. Etc.

And like natural laws, they combine. The law of gravity is one such, but in an atmosphere the laws of inertia provide wind resistance, and a falling body has a terminal velocity. The terminal velocity can vary as the falling body changes position relative to the direction of the fall--or if they suddenly acquire a lot of surface area by opening a parachute.

And that's why I don't like the term "rules," because people don't look beyond them. "Don't have your character look in a mirror and describe themself" is a rule like "don't jump out of a moving airplane" is a rule. Yes, you do it the wrong way and you'll go splat. But don't think about "jumping out of an airplane"; think about the laws of physics and you can safely jump out of all the airplanes you want. People do it all the time.

Now obviously not everyone (hell, practically no one) is going to think about their writing at this level while they're doing it (or, indeed, ever). And lack of thinking about it was what leads to crap such as that example with the blonde not-looking in the shiny surface. That the author is multi-published in hardcover is meaningless: she may not have written her first couple of books so poorly; she may have hit the right editor's desk during a serious dearth of thriller offerings; she may do other things in the book so well many readers overlook this sort of paragraph.

[thargoid5.livejournal.com]

Kristine,

your scene makes sense to me. you're not describing her, she is just doing part of her routine, its almost like its an afterthought of what she is doing.

The initial scene would piss me off if i read that.

I am more the 'no description' kind of person. My guy might rub his hand through his BLACK hair, because thats his nervous twitch. i might lety ou know if its short and or maybe the colour of his eyes, but that would be about it. I like leaving it up to the reader to fill in the blanks. But really that is all you offered in your scene as well. more than that, you showed us what kind of person she is and how she thinks. good one!

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

So, I think The Mirror Scene, if used sparingly, has a place.

Agreed. I used it in FIRES OF NUALA. And may have used it somewhere else. Who knows? But when you need it, you need it. FWIW, I also had what she looked like in toss off lines from two different men, in the next chapter.

As you said, not all gorgeous people know/believe that they are attractive.