chat

Because it's awkward and easily done in ways that can come off problematic. If you're describing an attractive character you end up coming off horny, if you describe an unattractive character you come off mean. If you're describing an attractive character of another race then you come off horny and fetishistic. So I guess a lot of author just opt for being vague on details.

This has always bothered me.

Bonus points if the author first mentions a specific trait, physical build, or whatever else halfway through the novel and totally fucks up my mental image.

This really gets my goat

because it usually isn't necessary for the story

Death to America

I'm pretty sure older works were very heavy on physical descriptions. And then moving pictures came around, and readers didn't care as much about visual characteristics as they did the plot.

If you read Victorian era stuff, FFS they don't stop describing how things look.

I believe character descriptions became a big thing in the time of physiognomy – when Balzac narrates someone's physical appearance, he wants you to extrapolate the character's personality from that. Physiognomy fell out of fashion and if there is no other motivation to provide a description, like signalling someone's class position or injecting a bit of lyricism, it's simply economical to leave it out. To provide a counter-example, Mary Gaitskill always writes exactly one paragraph of description in her short stories which you can just skip because it's not properly integrated into the story as a whole.

Read Raymond Chandler's novels and you'll get vivid descriptions of everything except what the fuck is going on

Idk, I read a lot and this is never an issue for me. Is it really such a hassle to reconstruct your mental image of something? I'm constantly considering and imagining characters as different builds, dressed differently, sounding differently, depending on how the context of the scene paints them. And by the end of the book I have a pretty firm mental image of what the character is like, born of a thousand iterations which finally and slowly merged into a cohesive whole.

You can just tell me what a character looks like down to the specific material of the buttons on their shirt, but that loses out on a certain amount of speculation and imagination. If a character who has so far had no reason to perform extraordinary physical feats suddenly finds it necessary--and possible--to lift an immense object, for example, my mental image is like "oh wait so he's jacked" which introduces a kind of 'twist' entirely in omission.

Usually I’m not interested in what made-up people make-believe look like unless it somehow drives the plot or develops the characters’ relationships.

Glad I'm not the only one who thinks this way. It seems to be so common to not have physical descriptions, that I was wondering if this was normal and I was the weird one for being so visual. There are some people with aphantasia, after all. I can see if they want you to use your imagination, but then you can't just suddenly mention something half way through the book that totally messes up my mental image! Ugh. Books are basically mental movies playing in my brain while I read. It's jarring to have to recast suddenly in the middle of the movie.

Writing physical descriptions is kinda it's own skill. I can't do it until I've actually drawn/seen a picture of a character, otherwise I really struggle to visualize them concretely enough to verbalize. Tbh even with people I know irl, I'd have trouble describing them without a picture in front of me.

Modern styles tend to be more action/plot oriented with less time devoted to florid descriptions of random stuff, so some authors may feel like if they write a physical description they have to justify the attention to it. And it's easy for things to get cringey. Like, if you give characters appearances that "match" their personality traits, that has potential to be problematic, then you've got the horny/objectifying types, and then there's, like, weird/uncomfortable analogies. For example, I remember reading some Philip K Dick and seeing the absolutely horrible, objectifying descriptions of female characters, while his male characters are barely described at all. Physical descriptions not being in style could be a reaction to various forms of cringe

I vaguely remember avoiding detailed descriptions of my characters writing fanfic because I didn't want people to think I was horny for my characters. So I went pretty far in the other direction.