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.

I describe mine, though not in the over-the-top way that I think is what Plei has a problem with. Currently, since I'm working with a first-person narrator, I try to describe what I think she'd notice most about herself and others. Nothing too florid, since Lucy isn't the kind of girl who'd think "luxuriously curled ebon tresses" when she meets a woman with curly black hair. But the reader will have a basic idea what major characters look like, and quite a detailed idea of how the hero looks and how much Lucy comes to enjoy looking at him. Because it's fun to write it that way.

Seeing it through first-person eyes, if done properly, is by nature one of the best show and tells out there. Having read a bit of yours, I remember nothing in the over the top descriptive range, at all.

Man, I am tired.

Here's a bit from my novel where the heroine first meets the hero. He's just been thrown from his horse, who refused a fence, and Lucy has just secured the horse and is offering her assistance. There's lots more dialogue and action going on than I'm quoting here, since it's a longish scene. Obviously, I let her describe him more than she would anyone else:

To my relief, he was already sitting up, methodically flexing and stretching his left arm. He was a dark-haired young man, Julius’s age or perhaps a few years older, wearing immaculately fitted riding clothes. I knelt beside him. “Sir! Are you injured?”

“Not very seriously, it would appear. But how is Ghost?” he asked, looking over my shoulder at his horse.

The ethereal gray mare was well-named, I thought. “She seems sound, I believe. I’m sorry I startled her.”

He scrambled to his feet, and I did the same. He looked at me properly for the first time, and I noticed his vivid, dark blue eyes. I had never seen such a color before. “Not your fault, unless you’re the one who caused that gust of wind,” he said. “And I must thank you for taking the trouble to secure her. You must know horses.” He had the voice of a cultured, educated gentleman, but with a faint hint of some regional accent I had not heard before, with richly sounded vowels and a lilting rhythm. It was pleasant, I thought.

(Stuff happens. They talk. He gets up and goes to examine his horse. Lucy checks out the horse, a gorgeous silver-gray Arabian, with all the ardor Laura Ingalls felt for Almanzo's brown Morgans.)

I turned my eyes from Ghost to examine her master more closely. He was a compact man, only about five and a half feet tall, but wiry and well-proportioned. His fair skin contrasted with his black hair and dark blue eyes—more the blue of a clear lake on a sunny day than a sky blue like my cousins’. As for his face, I would not have called it a handsome one, nothing to compare with Julius. To me, who had taken his blond, even-featured perfection as my standard of beauty, this man looked far too harsh. His nose was too strong, his cheekbones and jaw too pronounced. A lean and hungry look, I thought, like Cassius in Julius Caesar. I did not think him a handsome man, but once you looked at him, it was not an easy matter to turn away.

I managed. Mr. Wright may have been striking, but the mare was exquisite. “She seems very gentle,” I commented.

“That she is, but spirited, too.”

I hid a smile. No man, I supposed, wanted a horse whose dominant trait was gentleness. Indeed, I suspected that the reason this man galloped about the countryside on an elegant little Arabian rather than a rangy hunter like Hal and Julius favored was yet another species of male vanity. A short man would not show to as good advantage on a seventeen-hand hunter.

And that, dear readers, is how I describe people when I want to go into a bit of detail about it.

(Hoping the resounding silence means that everyone has gone to bed but me--however, if I have committed florid over-the-top description above, I'm welcome to suggested edits.)

Susan, I'm an ass. I read it and thought, what great voices, and, oh, he's short, how cool! and then started wondering about short heroes and how well they'd sell, and then that led to wondering about what made Amanda Quick, aka Jayne whatsises' books sell with her less than perfect heroines, including the one with the feeder hero, and that led me to thinking about romance and novels and....

Erm, it's good and I like it a lot. I really enjoy well-researched regencies. I did notice:

....I had never seen such a color before....with a faint hint of some regional accent I had not heard before

repetition of before...before

Good point--I have a bad habit of repeating words like that in a rough draft.

As for him being short, I hope it won't be a problem--she's short, too, so I haven't been brave enough in bucking romance trends to make her a tall woman with a short man. I made him that way partly because I'd already made him a handsome man with black hair and blue eyes and I didn't want him to look like he came straight from Central Casting, and partly because I happen to like the body type of such medium-short men as JM, Alexei Yagudin, and Ichiro Suzuki (though the latter at 5'10" is only short by baseball standards), so I wanted to give it to a hero.

Well, I've never read a novel where the hero was only 5'6", but I have read some regencies where he was 5'8" - 5'10" and comparisons were made to his 'more manly' friends and compatriots. Though, somewhere along in the novel, he surprises people with his wiry strength if he isn't introduced as being 'strongly built' at the beginning. I can only think of two at the moment, but they were well-done and enjoyable. I'm lousy at authors/titles though, so I can't tell you who did them.