So I finished The Order, soon to be known as The Empty West, better known by its working title, My God This Is Going On So Long Make It Stop The Horror, nearly two months ago now. A slurry of editing, a debate over publishing methods and a brief discussion with my tiny but devoted preview readership rightfully delayed the release until a few notable kinks had been suitably ironed the hell out.
Many of these kinks are irrefutable. Typos are a certainty; stylistic miscues brought on by late nights and constant re-editing (such as using the same adjective three times in as many clauses), equally so. Irritatingly obtuse word choice? Fine. I accept that "frangible" is not a word in common usage.
But there are some tweaks which bear second scrutiny. There are deliberate design decisions that go into any given work, and there are hundreds more completely accidental cock-ups that nevertheless become suddenly core to your ideology the second someone else decides they don't belong there.
That, stunningly, was not the case here.
My first review of The Order discovered a rather interesting unintentionally notion: I had managed to scribble out 592 pages of dialog and description without once ever describing the physical traits of my characters. Age, height, build, number of limbs, all were up for grabs. Save for the tacit implications of English pronouns, even their genders would be in question. It was a complete void.
To my surprise, I soon discovered that it hadn't been a simple oversight, a lack of translating my vision onto paper: I honestly had no idea what the characters looked like. I could recall, instantly and with great precision, the exact image of each locale, even of chief contests within the work.
Swordfights and sunsets alike flashed in perfect picture before my mind's eye yet, with the exception of one character's remarkable shade of hair, not one physical detail for any of my main characters sprang to mind.
I couldn't believe it. I'd been working on this book since roughly September of 2008, I'd written at least two of the characters almost 8 years prior to that in Gunner 7, and yet I remained with no physical notion of them at all.
I was astounded.
Understand, I'm a visual person. If you say "two elephants tap-dancing in tutus," within milliseconds I will hold in my mind a startlingly sharp notion of precisely that. I can tell you the shape of the elephants, the color of their tutus, even the expressions on their faces (probably something like "why in the hell are we tap-dancing, we're elephants, for heaven's sake").
Yet in something shy of eleven years plotting the fictional lives of these characters, it hadn't once occurred to me what in the devil they might look like.
...And then I was delighted.
I was delighted because, for years, I've fretted over race in fiction. Gender roles, differences in sexuality, the various modes of historical perspective were all hurdles I had long since herded. Race, or more specifically the implications of race through arbitrary physical features, remained a difficult road to navigate.
Normally, I might pause at this moment to go into my own race (or rather, features) to shed light on the unique perspective they bring to the argument, but the thing is, they do not. It does not matter what features you possess, if you are alive and a writer, race is, has been, or can be an issue for you, whether you have any awareness of it or not.
I will, however, pause long enough to emphasize the notion of denotation: by race, I here mean cultural identity. By features, I mean the physical qualities of your person. In our society, one typically defines the other, so people often mix them up, but they are not the same. Still, it's good to be aware that they are often mixed up so as to avoid accidentally offending anyone, or as I like to call it, "pulling a Lucas."
So upon realizing that I could write an entire novel without limiting the number of faces my characters could wear to any given reader, I decided to leave the characters as I had found them: essentially faceless. With the exception of adding a few notes on attire and relative ages to establish proximity to the world-ending event on which the setting was based, I left all physical descriptions on the cutting room floor.
This, I soon discovered, came as an annoyance to at least two of my readers.
My hope was that, without predetermined features, each reader would place their own details over the empty mannequins before them. However, the void proved too deep a chasm: without any identifiers to latch onto, their minds, instead of filling the blank canvas with colors all their own, simply picked up their proverbial crayons and went home in a huff.
I found myself at a crossroads: to put in any physical descriptions meant hedging the reader into potentially dangerous implications above and beyond any I'd ever intended, especially in a setting where there are few heroes and nearly everyone has something unsavory in store. To leave them blank meant frustrating potential readers with unidentifiable characters with whom they might have trouble connecting.
It wasn't as difficult a decision as I had been expecting.
If features sincerely don't matter, then adding them shouldn't change anything. That simple rule was enough for me to add them back in, largely chosen at random. All the natural qualities were picked out of a hat, I only put thought into the hairstyles since the character had liberty to change them.
Arguably, I could've taken it a step further and thrown the dice on their genders as well. That's how Shinigami Blues became a romance story between two men in the first place: I made a change to a feature I told myself made no difference, and fittingly, changing it made no difference.
I shuffled things up a few times to see if I was completely kidding myself, and everything read exactly as it had before. I'd never been more thrilled. My little accidental experiment had shown consistent results.
Hooray, science!
...Yes, in reality, there's all manner of personal bias involved, but without funding a proper double-blind study (key word being "funding"), it feels nice to have at least fooled myself.
The lesson of all this is to not feel locked into character traits.
For fantasy and sci-fi authors, I personally recommend against defining any race or species by skin tone where possible unless you're trying to actively make a point of its futility. As a gut-check, take any quality, any trait, physical or otherwise that stretches across an entire nation or species and change it. Radically.
Instead of blue skin and braids, give them six arms and two hearts. Instead of a fondness for music and poetry, try puzzles and games, sport and the hunt or, hell, macrame and underwater basketweaving, whatever it takes to clear your mind of its preconceptions.
See if it seriously changes anything. Does their culture revolve around that one aspect? Is it defined by it? Or is it superfluous?
If you're going to use aliens, elves and the like to represent human nations or qualities, by all means, do so; but know that you're doing it. If you're doing it by accident, it's best you know sooner rather than later.
Personally, I still have a fondness for the faceless model. In a story without a message of its own, it might serve as a great mind-expanding exercise, or a wonderful trick to play in the final pages. Layer Cake managed something similar by never revealing the protagonist's name.
Ever.
But when you're looking to establish characters for a long-running series, identity becomes too key a card to set aside in the name of an ultimately unnecessary experiment. So long as the features you choose are features alone and independent of any larger or seeming agenda, there's no danger in adding them, no matter what anyone will tell you.
Now if only I could fund that double-blind study...
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