On Objectification Of Genders and Gender Fantasies

There were actually three separate descriptions. If you're reading it as one dialogue, then that's incorrect.

Even as separate actions, the wording is a little...awkward? "Masculine, chiseled jaw"?

In any case, a reader's peeve of my is when an author has a character run his fingers through his hair as an excuse to describe his hair color. Sometimes, it feels forced.

If you're going to be THAT obvious, you may as well just have a mirror scene.

That's what I meant; even allowing for the considerable bias on my part, it seems the descriptions - not how they were worked in, but the actual wording - are a bit much.

Fine. Take the word "masculine" out. Take the word "chiseled" out. Substitute both for "butterscotch" for all it matters.

What the eff people.

Heh, I have to say, they do sound like lines out of a cheesy romance novel. But I take the point, it's a lot less intrusive to drop in lines that mention or hint at someone's appearance or personality than spend a page when you meet them listing off attributes.

I agree with Morven though, when you want to make someone sexy with writing, it's a good idea to make them sexy to another character, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so if you want to describe it, that's where you want to be. If you just blatantly go on about how hot a character is when they're standing by themselves, it makes it seem like either they're the POV and they're really narcissistic, or the narrator has become a pervy voyeuristic ghost. You can try and describe beauty objectively and leave it up to the reader to reconstruct the image in their head and find it attractive, but I think that either tends to end up with evocative language that puts you back in pervy ghost territory, or Ikea Erotica levels of charmless accuracy. Seems a bit pointless to me, when the medium includes an effective means of putting us actually inside a character's libido for as many vicarious boners as we feel like, plus that way the description can tell us about both characters and their relationship, rather than just the physical attributes of one.

edited 29th Jun '12 2:29:47 PM by Kesteven

Quoted for emphasis.

...My new short story plot.

Thanks!

Gggggreat.

But yeah, I do see your point King Zeal. It's that way with most writing issues, trying to make it flow without info dumps.

All of this.

This reminds me of a passage that I wrote a while ago from the perspective of a major female character in the story I am working on, two paragraphs of which linger obsessively on the appearance (or, more specifically, facial features) of another character. The point of the passage was to illustrate the former character's mental state: She is clearly attracted to the other character but refuses to admit it to herself, so she rationalises her staring with a kind of clinical measurement of the proportions of the fellow's features... until she notices that he has noticed her.

I like writing things like that. People are weird, and weird is fun to write.

That sounds like a nice way to do it in a scene, actually! Yes, those who aren't necessarily good at dealing with attraction do make excuses for it, especially if the person in question isn't what they're used to in some way. And being caught staring is always a good one. It cues the other person to the attraction (even if they're not sure if it's attraction or something else, it's definitely some kind of interest) and thus gives things a realistic reason to move forward.

Like all things, writing is about subtlety. I do tend to have two rules about this sort of thing:

1. The best practice is to be illusive enough that you invoke the intended feeling of the trope without the audience knowing that you're doing said trope.
2. If it's not possible to do the trope without the audience noticing it, play with it in a fun way.