I'm a liberal and I'm right! (channeling James Carville)

Teppy, lurve the tagline. Looks a skosh familiar....

For some reason people seem to feel the need to sterilize everything before they do this sort of investigation, so that they are seen as objective. To me that sort of misses the point. I find it nearly impossible to be objective about anything that affects real actual human beings. It's not a science experiment for crap's sake, but then I have this whole thing about over valuing reason and logic to the detriment of emotion and intuition.

Teppy, lurve the tagline. Looks a skosh familiar....

It's just such a VIVID phrase....

I'm a liberal and I'm right! (channeling James Carville)

One of my favorite Louisianians. I have his mamma's cookbook too! It thrills me to no end to feed some of her food to our conservative guests.

One of my favorite Louisianians.

I just want him to dump that Matalin cow, and make an honest woman of me. He rocks my world.

For some reason people seem to feel the need to sterilize everything before they do this sort of investigation, so that they are seen as objective. To me that sort of misses the point.

Amen. One of the reasons that N&D is so powerful is that even now, I can't help wondering about that pregnant woman who was working for The Maids, the one who only ate a snack-size bag of Doritos for lunch the one day because she didn't have the time, money, and/or energy to put together something more healthy.

I said this over in Literary, but N&D could be used as a textbook on why "show, don't tell" is so powerful.

Got a rejection from *Slate* for the poem. Well, bum. Off to find another market.

I still think about her too. We had somebody sit for us in grade school that was like that. Betsy, I'm sorry. Rejection sucks, doesn't it? May your next market appreciate and print the poem.

Oh, pooh, Betsy. A pox on them!

Question: Plei brought up something in Bitches that I'm moving here.

IfIsee'thethinblonde'or'thepretty,raven-hairedgirl' or any other use and abuse of descriptives, I'm going to kick someone in the ass, hard.

This is a warning. I catch ANY of you doing this shit, you're going down. Hard. And not in the good, porny way. Oh no.

You're going down, and I am taking your keyboards and beating you over the fucking heads.

Okay, how much description is enough? I've taken grief for NOT describing my characters, other than gender, a general impression of age, or youth, or some physical trait such as a limp or a facial tic. Occasionally eye color, or "dark."

I have two members of my writing group yipping at my heels because they don't know what my characters look like, how old they are, they don't have enough detail to create a mental picture of the character.

My feeling is that I leave the externals up to the individual reader. If the mental and emotional progressions resonate, the reader can "take on" the character, or relate him or her to someone the reader knows.

They're pushing really hard, and I feel equally strongly about this. So who's right?

I'm more towards your side and Plei's, but I like some externals, thanks; while I go into bruxism over phrases like "her long gleaming brown tresses", I do want to know how old your character is. One of the problems in the ReallyBadNovel was that our first meeting with a particular female character left me with a vivid impression of an avid frustrated woman in her forties. Turns out she was meant to be about 25; her behaviour didn't sound that way to me.

I'm fine with descriptives, as it happens, but it's the way they're written that's the issue for me. Plei's examples are pure tell and no show; like her, I want to reach for a cluestick. Don't tell me she's thin and pretty and blonde. Show me.

Again with the BadNovelists. They asked for an example on how to impart information that was shown, not told. I came up with this.

Telling: "Mary was a blonde, blue-eyed girl in her twenties. She had long legs and was smarter than she looked."

Showing: "Mary stretched her legs as far as they'd go. "You know," she remarked, "I'm seriously considering getting some of those tinted contact lenses. Between the blue eyes and the blonde hair? Everyone seems to think I'm a moron."

So it's how you present it.