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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 a...
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T06:11:49Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/27018 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
user2859458
·
2019-12-08T06:11:49Z (almost 5 years ago)
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?
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2017-03-04T00:00:38Z (over 7 years ago)
Original score: 8