Why introduce new physical appearance details late in the narrative?
I find it horribly irritating when I'm half way through a book and suddenly discover a character I imagined as skinny is now "folding his arms across his barrel chest" or a character I envisioned as one ethnicity is now described as another. It's really jarring.
Seems like it would be a bad idea to restructure your reader's depictions of a character long after the character has been introduced, but I see this fairly frequently. Usually it's just a bit of flavor on the character and isn't related to the plot, but even if the detail is plot-critical, it seems to me that it would be important enough to work it in as the character is being established rather than disrupt the reader's picture. I mean, why hide it?
What value is there in adding physical appearance details late in the story and potentially causing the reader to "reload" the character?
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1 answer
This is the result of two misguided pieces of advice given to most aspiring writers today: "show, don't tell", and "jump right into the action". Taken together, these two piece of advice leave no room for the writer to set up their story. So writers ask, how am I supposed to tell the reader the backstory? How am I supposed to tell the reader what my characters look like? And the advice they are given is to work it into the narrative as things go along.
One of the results of this is what you are seeing. It is one of the first things that jumps out at me in many people's writing that I read in critique groups. I call it the reset. The writer give us a couple of hints about a person or a scene. If that is all we get, we build our own images around those details. That would be fine if the details we were given were enough to evoke an image and contain all the information that actually matters to the story.
But then a few pages later, the writer drops a few more details. The picture we have built up shatters and we have to reset and build the picture again.
Then a few pages later a few more details drop. At which point the reader gives up and runs screaming from the room.
The basic problem is that, though they may have some merit in some situations, and if not taken too far, these types of advice, combined with the lamentable obsession with writing in the first person, put the writer in a straightjacket. They take away half the writer's toolkit. Take half the tools away and it is no wonder that the work is often clunky.
Of course, we have all read painful info-dumps and wooden characterizations. But that is just immature craft. Not doing info-dumps or characterization at all is not the answer to not being very good at them. The answer is to get better at them. Note that the first several pages of the first Harry Potter book (or any Steinbeck novel) are pure info dump and characterization. But they are done well.
By the same token, of course, taking off the straightjacket won't automatically cure all of a writer's craft issues. It is still a very hard craft to master and there are few if any shortcuts. But at least with the straightjacket off, the writer can begin to work on their craft.
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