Random Questions Thread

How long can one wait with describing a characters appearance and mention important facts about them?

She is 'there' on the first page but I think I have to move the appearance description to the third chapter. So up until the third chapter the reader will only know her name, that she is a 'she', and that she happen to be wearing a yellow jumpsuit. Most people will assume that she is white, and then Suddenly Ethnicity...

In my fanfic, I got up to 10k words barely describing the protagonist's appearance at all. Not that I'm the best person to take writing advice from.

edited 18th Apr '14 11:30:58 AM by storyyeller

Sure, one don't really have to describe them at all. People will build their own mental image. But that wasn't really what I asked. I mean, the reader would make a mental image, and then suddenly there is this decription that doesn't match that.

Well, you should only include so much description as is relevant to the story, as it becomes relevant to the story, so the answer is "as long as the story requires." That said, is there any particular reason you wait so long before adding in more details?

Depends on the story. The vast majority of Sci-Fi and Military stories use Broad Strokes and Indirect Characterization for character descriptions ESPECIALLY for throway/one-off characters

Right now it breaks the flow right in the start. It feels unnatural, forced and possibly a little racist.

I have tested rewriting it, but that just ended up with the male protagonist ogling her. Which would be out of character and would change the readers view on their relationship.

Some minor characters are also introduced in chapter three, so doing it then would make people assume she's a minor character and that guy is the real protagonist.

edited 18th Apr '14 2:14:17 PM by m8e

You could slip in incidental descriptions into your text instead of using a full on paragraph in the earlier chapters as a stop-gap. For instance, using phrases like "said the dark-haired woman" after she speaks.

And while we're on the subject of character description, would describing a (young) male character with phrases like him having "a broad jaw", "heavy brow atop a perfectly straight nose", and "a face that was all squares and triangles" convey memorable imagery to the reader?

So in my setting, people start to develop unique abilities (telekinesis, spontaneous combustion, making spots appear on a wall, it's different for everyone) between the age of 5 and 10. It starts out weak at first, but gets stronger with age. So a kid might be able to warm their hands when their ability first manifests, but they won't be able to light candles until their teens, maybe.

Any side effects of this setting detail that I should keep in mind?

The main consideration I have with such things is that in the real world, we have such things as age of consent and the like. Few fictional settings I am familiar with have such things, nevermind problems with enforcing such rules if they exist (after all, such abilities often don't depend upon outside factors), so that could lead to problems.

You mean like who takes responsibility if an elementary school student manages to get himself or others hurt because of his developing abilities? Or how the local government handles a child that can't control her powers (if at all)?

Yes, and what does happen if someone tries something reckless with one of their powers.

Is there anything an enemy faction can do to legitimately justify destroying their homeworld with an Earth-Shattering Kaboom?

Maybe if they did the same to somebody else?

Destroying their own homeworld?

There's a faction in Star Control II that stimulated their sun to supernova as the last line of defence against an overwhelming force that was methodically invading all of known space.

Probably not. Even if killing all of them is the only legitimate solution, it's far simpler to kill all life on a planet than it is to outright destroy it.

Really, outright destroying anything bigger than, say, Ceres is just showing off.

To be fair, destroying Ceres is not that hard in the grand scheme of things. It's GBE is tiny compared to the moon, much less the Earth (which is itself at best a planet of average size, and a small one at worst). You'd still need about a thousand times the current world nuclear stockpile to do it, but it's a feat that's possible with the technology currently available to humans.

Destroying the moon however... that's a ways off. Not that we'd really want to, anyway...

EDIT: Almost forgot my question. Let's suppose creatures from another universe where the laws of physics operate differently cross over into our universe. What do you think would happen? Would they become subject to our laws, or would they defy our understanding?

edited 19th Apr '14 8:16:56 PM by KSPAM

That's like asking, what if 1+1 suddenly became 3, what would happen to 2+2?

I don't really follow your metaphor.

It's asking about a hypothetical which has no real world basis. The answer is whatever you want it to be, since you're the one making up the conditions in the first place.

Thanks for the comments, have found a place where the skin color could be mentioned 'offhand'. The other stuff could wait until later. (Like, people assume that dark people have dark hair, what kind of dark hair isn't really important.)

edited 20th Apr '14 1:41:35 PM by m8e

@KSPAM: If beings that came from a universe that was organized by some noneuclean geometry came here, they would likely become deformed and die.

That's assuming their constituent molecules don't decay instantly as they're forced to reconfigure to meet a new set of physical laws, resulting in a mess of radioactivity and assorted particles.

Even reversed chirality would probably result in a quick and ugly death.

Even reversed chirality would probably result in a quick and ugly death.

Well, if part of their bodies did change chirality and other parts don't. Merely changing from world with chirality A to world with chirality B would simply result in food incompatibility.

Nope. There are a fair number of biological processes at the cellular level that require chirality to be set up the way it is, and won't work if it's not. You wouldn't survive very long when your ATP exchanges don't work.

Biochemically life from a reversed-chirality world would be completely different from us in more ways than just the reversal. Complex molecules and proteins would have to be completely reworked.

edited 20th Apr '14 3:20:58 PM by Night