Epic Lab of Oddities: Building Face and Body

I hope you are enjoying the generators provided in the Epic Lab of Oddities. There are now generators for the Head and Body features available.

Paint Me a Picture
You don’t describe a character from head to toe and constantly review what they look like. Some introductory details and a few pertinent clues will be enough to help readers form and keep a picture in their minds.

You’re inviting readers to peep into characters’ lives and view their thoughts, emotions and actions. Such an intimate exposure requires them to be fully formed, multi-layered, three-dimensional characters who will inspire some sort of reaction in your readers: empathy, sympathy or even hate.

From the first moment a character is introduced, the reader’s imagination will create an image. As the dialogue and narrative provide more description, that image changes with each introduction of an emotion, action, or dialogue tag.

You don’t need to describe every character in your story. Background characters don’t need a description unless you need a detail as part of your story or you want to add a little quirk. You can let the readers’ imagination describe these non-essential characters.

If main or secondary characters are left undescribed, readers will imagine their own physical features onto the character. If you want your readers to picture the characters a certain way, you need to provide the right descriptions.

If you wait too long to introduce descriptions, your readers will reject your description in favor of their already-jelled image.

That’s not to say that you dump loads of description. Let it unfold gradually as your story develops, sprinkled into dialogue, dialogue tags, action and narrative.

Don’t just list physical traits, weave them into your story in small pieces. Choose interesting details to describe or focus on with each interaction.

The Eyes Have It

The faces of your characters are essential for keeping them real. We deal with faces all day long.

What you feel inside is often reflected on your face. If you’re happy, you smile, your eyes twinkle, your skin glows. If you’re angry, your mouth puckers, your brows furrow, your eyes glare.

We all have uniqueness in our faces. The facial features of each of us is unique, even twins aren’t exactly alike. There are subtle differences in arch of eyebrow or fullness of lip. Find that uniqueness by using the correct words to describe those features that make us each individual.

How you describe your characters will paint a picture in the readers’ mind. Make sure you are providing enough description to make each character unique without adding so much detail that your readers can’t use some imagination.

Is their face square or chiseled? Do they have chipmunk cheeks or are they gaunt? Are they squinty- or hollow-eyed? Are their brows wispy or bushy? Is their mouth crooked or slack-jawed? Are their teeth straight or bucked? How about their ears, elf-like or elephant-like?

Eye color doesn’t matter in the long run, they can be brown or green or blue. But will that make an impression?

It may not seem like eye color would matter, as no one will ever see the color. But you do, in your head, as you write. When you see the cobalt blue eyes of a character, that becomes part of them as you see them. Make us see the same.

Hair is another feature that is different for everyone and very subjective. Long hair to one could mean to the waist, to someone else to the shoulders.

Hair is not just hair; it has a length, a color, a style and a condition. A mane or a mop? Buzzed or receding? Russet or toffee? Crewcut or ponytail? Flyaway or thinning?

Most people have feelings about their hair which give us insight into their personality. Many people are bored or not satisfied with their natural hair and find ways to change it, whether though color, cut or style. Others don’t want to be bothered with hair and keep it short. Even others spend inordinate amounts of time on their hair and take pride in matching their style to any occasion.

Bodybuilding Champion

Body type, skin tone, body marks, even hands are opportunities to provide better visuals for your readers.

Are they petite or pot-bellied? Alabaster skin or olive? Do they have tattoos or track marks? Are their hands elegant or calloused?

Body descriptions will often be described in conjunction with movement or action. Similes and metaphors are very useful for providing illustrations without details.

Are they nimble like a deer or do they lumber like an elephant? Hunched shoulders like a vulture awaiting the death of its prey or perfect posture like a superhero watching over her city?

Use the Epic Lab of Oddities generators to spark your imagination and come up with dynamic descriptions that will make your characters multi-layered and unforgettable.

Stay tuned for Traits, Emotions and Actions!

The Epic Lab of Oddities: Creating Captivating and Unforgettable Characters

This is the first in a series on creating your fictional characters. Make no mistake, you are Dr. Frankenstein, creating your own walking, talking creatures.

But where do you get the parts? Where can you find just the right body type? Do you want lean and leggy? Or chiseled and muscular? Maybe emaciated and gaunt?

Most of us focus on the face first, as that’s where we get most of our social cues. Instead of brown hair and eyes, why not caramel or copper hair and cognac or mahogany eyes? They all bring to mind a particular shade of brown that isn’t as generic as brown.

And the face. Where are you going to find just the right facial shape, the right cheeks, chin, ears—all those individual features that make up a face?

Look no further. I have also been creating, dumping endless supplies of body parts, traits, emotions, quirks, actions, senses and more into the Epic Lab of Oddities. And the most amazing random descriptions are popping out. Hopefully, you’ll find some ideas that will spark your own.

I’ve created the Basics generators, giving you alternative descriptive words for your characters:

·      Hero or Villain

·      Good or Bad

·      Strong or Weak

·      Big or Small

·      Tall or Short

·      Thin or Heavy

·      Beautiful or Ugly

Go have some fun with them. The rest of the series will include:

·      Part 1: The One Thousand Dollar Man – from hero or villain to beautiful or ugly (we can rebuild him; faster, stronger)

·      Part 2: The Eyes Have It – facial features and hair

·      Part 3: Bodybuilding Champion – body types and body features

·      Part 4: The Quirk in Quirky – personality types, from bossy to wise

·      Part 5: Cry Me a River – reactions, emotions and body language

·      Part 6: Moves Like Jagger – expressions, actions and opinions

·      Part 7: The Tenth Sense – from sight and hearing to hunger and pain

The One Thousand Dollar Man

While plotting is vital to any story, characterization is also extremely important. It doesn’t matter if it is a plot-driven story or a character-driven story; the character-driven story merely has the character driving the plot.

Many writers map out their characters before they start writing, while others wait to meet their characters on the page. However it works best for you, the words you write to describe them should be as rich as your characters.

Dynamic character creation is vital to storytelling. If your characters are forgettable, two-dimensional or flat, no reader will care what happens to them.

If they’re dynamic and real—someone you would want to meet, be friends with, go on vacation with—they will linger in your mind long after the final page is turned.

Your characters should seem like flesh and blood people with attributes and characteristics of everyday people. They should be believable and real, very much like your neighbors, co-workers and the Starbucks barista.

The more details you provide—the more interesting and real the character becomes to you—the better you can get that character to come alive for your audience.

While some descriptions need to be provided in your narrative, those traits that can be shown through action or dialogue will be stronger and stay longer with the reader. The more dynamic your descriptions, the more unforgettable the character.

Make your reader want to know your characters better. Let them see peeks and hints of traits through their actions or dialogue. What doesn’t flow into those categories can be fleshed out in narrative. And sprinkle those descriptions, don’t pour. Don’t give them so much detail that the reader can’t take some liberties in their imaginations.

General

Good or bad, beautiful or ugly, big or small, short or tall, heavy or thin, strong or weak.

All of these words are subjective; each reader will interpret them differently. Beauty to one reader will be ugly to another. Using more descriptive words lets the reader nail down what you mean.

People are not good or bad, they are degrees and combinations of each. Bad means something quite different than evil or cruel or selfish or just mischievous; but even villains can be considerate or kind in certain situations, making them not all bad.

And your hero isn’t merely good, they are courageous or sympathetic or wise or generous. But they can also be rude or aggressive in the right situation, so not all good.

Giving your characters only good or bad traits limits the scope of the story you can tell. It can make them two-dimensional and not relatable or interesting.

Use your words! You know tons of them, you’ve just forgotten you know them. The Epic Lab of Oddities is meant to give you some alternatives to spark some of your own ideas.

So get to creating your creatures or darlings, I have plenty of material for you. It’s your lab, have fun!