A Girl With a Nose

                When you’re writing original fiction, or at least original characters for fan fiction, one of the first things you are going to have to decide, is what they look like.  This is not as easy as “tall, dark and handsome” or “She had more curves than Sandy Koufax and eyes you could see your grandchildren in”.  Think of the role each character is going to play in your story.  If you were casting the story as a movie, who would you get to play your character?  Adriana Lima is hot, but you wouldn’t get her to play the soccer mom of the three adorable tykes that Vin Diesel must protect from Terrorist. Joe Pesci is funny, but he’s not getting offered any roles as the Marine Captain storming the beaches of Iwo Jima. Why? Because appearances have implications.  Your audience will assume things about your characters based on their appearances whether you intended them to or not.

                Appearance will always be linked to back story, because either your history shaped your appearance, or your appearance shaped your history. Sometimes it’s a bit of both. Someone with good genetics for an athletic build, clear skin, and a great smile, is going to exit high school on a different trajectory than a kid with a glandular condition that tends towards obesity and acne. His looks made him popular, his popularity made him confident and successful, and his confidence and success gave him charisma. He’s looking at better jobs, faster promotions and more attractive girlfriends than his classmate.  If you see a guy like this walking down the street, in an expensive suit, you are going to subconsciously make a lot of assumptions about him based on your own life experiences, and you probably won’t be too far off. Cliché’s are cliché’s for a reason.

                                                                           

                From the other direction, if you grew up in a Kentucky coal mining town, where your father and grandfather and older brother worked the mine until it collapsed and the company closed it, your hands are rough, your clothes are practical and durable and cheap because you know how hard your parents had to work to pay for them. You’ve never had a Justin Bieber haircut in your life. Even when you leave to find work in the city, who you were shapes who you are.  People will look at you, and though they won’t know everything about you a lot of your past will be implied by how you look.

                I say all that to get to this. There is a subtle but very important difference between being attractive and being appealing. Paris Hilton is attractive, but how much time would you really want to spend hanging out with her? Once you get past the looks, she’s not very appealing. You want your readers to want to hang out with your characters, and this is done by making us feel connected. Most of your readers are not supermodels. Even the ones, who are lucky enough to be good looking, are aware that they aren’t perfect, so when you describe your character as a flawless Adonis, we don’t feel like he represents us at all. He represents the star quarterback who sat at the cool kids table in the cafeteria and dated the head cheerleader that you had the worst crush on who signed your yearbook, “Have a great summer Kenny XOXO” , but your name wasn’t Kenny, and she should know that, you’ve only had like  8 classes together.  Making your character perfect eliminates a lot of your opportunities as a writer. How do you make your character grow if he’s already where he should want to be? How do you write a convincing love triangle if no woman in her right mind would choose the other guy?What do you get for the man that has everything?

                The trick is to make the character attractive enough to be appealing, but with an imperfection or two that humanizes them.  To this end, I like a girl with a bit of a nose. 

A girl with a nose has an interesting face, a face with character. One that warrants a second look and on that second look, you decide it’s not really a flaw. It’s something about her that you could see yourself being kind of fond of in a girl you were dating. The nose implies back story.  For a guy this is a girl that might have dated you in high school. She wasn’t that cheerleader who only dated quarterbacks.  Maybe she skateboarded to school; maybe she was in the theater club or on the soccer team.  She was cute, but not so gorgeous that you made a fool out of yourself when you talked to her.  For a girl she’s the friend you grew up with who didn't graduate middle school, get her braces out, and stop talking to you when the cool kids decided she was one of them.  She’s probably still your friend even though she went to a different college out of state. So a nose that may be a shade too long, maybe a jaw that's more strong than petite. Something to humanize them.

                The point is people write fan fiction because the characters feel like old friends and we’re not ready to let go. The more your characters feel like people that we know, people that we would want to spend time with, and are unwilling to let go of, the more appealing they will be, even if they aren’t traditionally beautiful.  The things they say and do will be the larger part of who they are,  but it all begins with appearances.