Character description (or lack of): A question

[kaitie]

I've got an odd one for you peeps out there. I mentioned awhile back that I've got a character who is Asian American. While I do some descriptions of her initially, I don't mention this until about the third or fourth time she shows up. I did this specifically because I wanted to avoid the reader filling in any stereotypes before they had a chance to get a grasp of the character.

Ever since then, I've been debating over another, but somewhat similar issue. One of my MCs cohorts is African American. This is mentioned briefly in the first chapter, though nothing is ever really made of it. It does, however, serve a minor purpose in the story. There is a scene when a character is killed and the initial scanner report says that a white male was seen leaving the scene. Now, it's pretty clear early on that my MC had nothing to do with this, but part of the fun of the middle of the book is that my chick is being lied to by an FBI agent about said MC, and one of the things she uses to convince her that he's a bad guy is a sketch from a "witness" testimony that's a dead ringer for his cohort, claiming that he's the one who killed the other character. Uh...hopefully that made sense.

It's a small detail and in theory the reader is on the MCs side, but it's just one of those moments when even though you're on his side, you kind of wonder about this as well. Well, I'd hope anyway. So it's essentially a small detail that should be a clue that they're lying (because the initial reports stated white male), but that she misses.

I've been seriously considering not mentioning at all until this interrogation scene that he's African American. Granted, one of my friends read it and said that he always forgets that, so maybe it's not a big deal in the first place. I tend to like allowing the reader to establish their own idea of what the characters look like. I guess what I'm wanting to know is if you read a character and assumed he was white (the other two are, though honestly I don't know if this is an assumption everyone would make or only white people would make), would you be irritated to find out halfway through the book that he wasn't?

I always think of Atlas Shrugged where she described the main character as blond, I think, and it drove me crazy because in my mind she had jet black hair (might have that backwards), but that was something she mentioned often from early on.

Anyway, just looking for opinions. I don't think it detracts from the story to have it in there early on, but I kinda like the idea of not mentioning it, too.

[Maxinquaye]

I don't think it's bad to describe the character a bit. Most writers do. In Stephen King's "The Talisman" you get to know at once that the character is a twelve year old boy that's tall and has brown hair. In the Harry Potter-series you get to know about his hair and his scar and his age.

In Council brats, critters strike out that Michael has red curly hair, and I put it right back in. So, I sin there too. From your description it sounds as if there is a function to your description. If you don't mention that he's African-American, then you'll risk having scenes that make no sense, as you describe.

I say, as long as it's details, it's okay. It would be wrong if you described every detail.

[JamieFord]

I think you're better off finding a way to clue the reader in. If this were a screenplay, you wouldn't be hiding the person's ethnicity from the viewer, no need to do so in a reader's mind.

[kaitie]

That's true. I didn't think of it as hiding it, but that's essentially what I'd be doing. Good point. Thanks. :)

[Lady Ice]

Readers'll be pretty annoyed if you just say 'Oh, by the way he's African-American and that's kind of important to the plot'.

[ClaudiaGray]

I've seen this done well -- I'm thinking of Kelley Armstrong's YA series, in which the ethnicity of two important characters isn't mentioned until about 2/3 of the way through -- but in those situations, the ethnicity isn't key to the plot at all. I'd give some description earlier in this case.

[Libbie]

Yeah -- if it's important to the plot, definitely establish it early on.

[backslashbaby]

I generally think it annoys people to mess up their mental image of a character once they've had time to form one. If there is something very clever about having to do that, awesome. Otherwise, better not :)

[Gedaechtnis]

It always annoys me to read a book, think of a character as a brown-haired, blue-eyes girl and suddenly she's Filipina and I'm like WTF? It's probably best to mention that he's black.

[DWSTXS]

I wouldn't like going along thinking of the character in my mind as looking like this or that (because I didn't know any better) only to find out later, that the character can't possibly look like that.
I'd feel sort of cheated, because, if it made a difference in the first place, then why wasn't the character described in the first place?

Also, I might feel like the author threw it in there in some blatant attempt to change up the story, and it would feel too intrusive to have it come about that way.

If it really doesn't matter, they why did the author make the character black anyway?

Lastly, I just might feel that the author DID mention it previously, and I didn;t catch it, and at THAT point I might decide that if I missed something that overt, then I haven't been following along as closely as I should have been, and what else have I missed?

In effect, it would ruin it for me.

But, that's just me.

[Tanydwr]

It's probably best to include some sort of reference, even if it's a few really casual references to dark skin or curly black hair if you don't want to say, out and out, that he's African-American. Or talk about contrasts of colours (the favourite is white teeth against dark skin), something like that. There's still a chance people will miss it if they half-skim like I sometimes do, but it's still there.

[smcc360]

Well, if memory serves (and its been a while), Heinlein didn't reveal Johnny Rico's ethnicity until the end of Starship Troopers. Easy to do in a first-person narrative, I think. Considering the era in which it was written and published, this counted as a Big Reveal.

More recently, I read that Stephanie Meyer avoided a detailed description of Bella Swan in Twilight to allow readers to more easily identify with her.

I like to sneak in a little bit of description with the reactions of other characters, while letting the reader fill in most of the blanks with their own imagination. But I agree with previous posters about getting important plot-relevant details out as soon as possible. Having to go back and revise scenes they've already imagined will knock a reader right out of the story.

[Aidan Watson-Morris]

It's hard, but doable.