Creating character imagery without describing their physical looks
This is more for my own curiosity than anything else but I was wondering if when reading about a character with no specified gender and no description of their looks, does the choice of words used to describe their personality affect what your mental image of who you think they are?
I ask because I have been working on a story for a few days and I just realised that in the 3.5k~ words I have written I have never actually specified anything physical about the character or used any gender-specific terms despite having a good idea in my head of who they are.
So other than physical descriptions what factors influence a reader's "image" of a character?
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This is more for my own curiosity than anything else but I was wondering if when reading about a character with no specified gender and no description of their looks, does the choice of words used to describe their personality affect what your mental image of who you think they are?
If personality traits that are particularly strongly associated with a specific gender in the reader's culture are stressed this can lead to a reader making assumptions, as can the genre of the story but in the absence of these factors most people are going to assume a POV character of non-specified gender (as in it hasn't been specified, not that they are explicitly non-binary!) is going to be the same gender as them. Especially where the POV is 1st person.
Beyond gender readers will start to form an image based on things we know about them - e.g. their profession - if someone described a character as being a "blacksmith" for example readers will likely start to attribute certain characteristics to the way the character looks, e.g. large, muscular etc.
Or if a character starts to fit into a common trope in other media/stories they will start to imagine them as looking similar to other examples they have "seen". But the details will vary wildly depending on that reader's own experiences.
If a character is a hard-ass drill instructor for example I'm going straight to R. Lee Ermey in my head - because I grew up with things like Full Metal Jacket and Space: Above and Beyond so in the absence of any other descriptive cues my brain pulls up "archetypal drill instructor" and that's mine - for someone who had different influences in their life it may be completely different.
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I seldom describe my characters to the readers; other than traits that are important to the plot, or are already obvious by the plot. Even then, I strive to have other characters make comments on their appearance or looks, and those in somewhat general terms. Or their appearance enters into the thoughts of the POV character.
Readers develop their own ideas, and I think this makes it easier for the readers to identify with the characters they like, and imagine what they will.
One thing I do is find a way to quickly indicate gender, but that might be done by name, or if the name isn't gender specific (or is not usually used with the gender) then with a pronoun. e.g. "Charlie was washing her hair".
Other physical traits can be important to the plot, and should be brought up long before they are necessary. If a person is particularly tall, and that comes in handy, we should know it before we imagine a person of average height. The same for athleticism, or widely perceived beauty, or anything else out of the ordinary.
But I try not to have the narrator do that description; I prefer to invent some situation so the characters do it.
Marcie said, "If Alex were here, I bet he could reach it."
"And if we had a ladder we could reach it, but we don't have Alex or a ladder, so -- any other ideas?"
We also have self reference:
"Oh my god, I love this dress! Do you love it?"
"On you, sure. You have a bust, I can't fill it."
Readers can get a sense of what a character looks like by how other people in the story treat the character, and how the character thinks and behaves. I prefer to leave it at that.
Of course, all that might be ruined by your cover art showing a depiction of one or more characters!
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