Describing POC's Skin...

[DragonOfTheAerie]

I really like to describe my characters. Maybe you guys don't, but my preference is to give a clear idea of what my characters look like. A character's appearance can say a lot about what they are like (clothing, body language...) I have a picture in my mind of what most of my characters look like, which I want to share. Also, having fan art sounds amazing...

Of course, I write in the first person, so my descriptions will be based on my MCs' perception. My MC's might not notice skin color that much. They live in the tropics, where light skin is relatively rare. (Average would be maybe a medium brown.) People with light skin are familiar but they exist outside the bell curve. So, my characters might feel compelled to describe a light-skinned person's skin color, but not someone with a darker skin tone. It might be more interesting to focus on clothing, weapons, and stuff like that in description rather than skin/hair/eye color. (There's rarely a reason to describe eye color. I don't even notice eye color when I meet someone.) But, skin color will probably come up. Especially with the love interest of my female MC, who loves to describe. (Her POV provides lots of description.)

My MCs themselves probably won't feel the need to describe themselves or each other.

 

[Nimue]

I always forget, between these discussions, that straight white amateur writers are the most persecuted people in the world. Every day, they face the risk of a person maybe critiquing their writing on social issues one day when it gains enough traction for anyone to even care.

I'm slightly done.

 

[Reaver]

Again, I want to remind all participants in this thread to treat other members with respect. The posts in this thread are the opinions of the members posting them. There are no right or wrong opinions. If you can't participate in this thread without being respectful, then don't participate.

This is my final reminder. Any further disrespect will not be tolerated.

 

[aceunavailable]

I, personally, enjoy describing my characters. I want my readers to be able to picture them as clearly as I do, because to me that's part of reading a book. Sure, you want to be entertained by the plot, but to be fully immersed in a novel, for me, I have to be able to picture the characters. And, considering that I'm writing a fantasy/dystopian monster of a genre novel, skin color matters to how well they blend in to their surroundings, identifying what jobs they may do (some of the lower castes work almost exclusively outside, giving them a more tanned appearance and meaning that more melanin in the skin would be a helpful feature), and otherwise just telling my main character(s) (it switches between their viewpoints chapter to chapter) more about their history. Certain races (wing colors) tend to have more people of a certain race. All of this has lead me to this point: there has been a lot of discourse on this thread as to how (not to mention why or why not) to describe people with varying brown complexions. However, I've noticed there's little to nothing on how to describe Latinx skin tones (the post somewhere above that describes how Europeans (generally considered "white") have pinker tones to their skin than those of Asians (in general, may not always be the case) has been very helpful). Does anyone have any ideas for how to describe Latinx skin tones? Is the commonly used "olive" ok or not? I also want to work on describing my white character (s? unsure yet if more than one), because I know NOT describing white characters skin tone after describing everyone else's only perpetuates the White Until Proven Otherwise problem novels have. Sorry, I just want to be able to describe my characters in a way that isn't hurtful to anyone, or at least the majority of people.
I do know that it's being debated whether or not TO describe skin tones, but to put that aside for a moment, can anyone tell me HOW? (Not just people with brown complexions but all complexions, white included?)

 

[Devor]

On a related topic, this was on my facebook feed recently.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1898869586865124

 

[Svrtnsse]

I've got characters of varying skin tones, and I've ended up just using the names of the colours to describe them. White, pink, grey, brown, black.

After threads and discussion like this one, I decided the best option for me would be to keep it plain and stick to just colours. I don't often go into elaborate detail about how my characters look anyway, so keeping it simple works better for me.

 

[VfortheShadow]

I'm erring on the side of not describing skin tone. I've been working on these characters for so long that their appearance in my head is too ingrained to change, but they default far too often. This best solution I can come up with is to let the reader default too.

But if you want to you don't want to go that route, this is where beta readers come in handy. The more people who you get as betas, the more perspectives you can get to find out if you're coming across as insensitive or not. You can even higher editors specifically for that kind of service.

You also could-and really should-do research into the opinions on the subject.

But all this is jumping ahead. You've got to finish the book first, so write what you're going to write and fix it in post.

 

[Firefly]

This is a tricky thing. Comparisons are difficult, as skin has a very specific texture and feel. It oftentimes ends up feeling weird when you compare it to things that don't match. (You probably wouldn't say your character's skin is the color of cardboard or bark, for example, even if those objects are the right shades.) And there aren't a lot of texturally appropriate skin colored objects out there that don't feel either cliche, insulting, or out of place. You can still think of things, of course, but sometimes it's more of a brainwashed than its worth.
I've resorted to just using boring words like pale, brown, dark, and tan most of the time. They don't make for extraordinary prose, but they're hard to overuse. When that doesn't give quite the picture I want, I sometimes resort to undertones like golden or pinkish or bronze. I dislike terms like fawn and dusky, I feel like their meaning isn't clear enough and not enough people know what they mean.

 

[toomanyhobbies]

I don't worry too much about describing the exact shade of skin; I always imagine people can - and will - use their imaginations (I'm also into illustrating, and several illustrators I know have taken to drawing Harry Potter as black, because of how Rowling always contrasted Voldemort's "white" skin with Harry's when Harry was seeing things from Voldemort's point of view). It's not really *that* big a deal of they guess the shade wrong...is it?

Anyway, when I'm describing appearances, I really don't mention their skin much except maybe in contrast with someone else's; I usually describe hair and body or facial structure just as much, if not more than, skin color. This is going to sound bad, but we do have stereotypes on our side, if you think about it. *Traditionally* speaking, if someone is blond, they'll usually be Caucasian; likewise with red hair. Not always, but often! So if they they have a type of hair that typically goes with a certain skin color, you may not have to mention the skin at all. If your character is African American but they have blond hair, then you'll have to clarify it; otherwise, we'll just assume the skin color that fits the traditional stereotype of the hair. Likewise blue eyes are somewhat stereotypical to lighter skin; while black, tightly curled hair is generally expected to go with dark skin. I know white people can have black, tightly curled hair, but realistically, it won't be most people's first thought. In one of my books, a main character was African American. The main characteristic I used wasn't her skin (I may have mentioned once that her skin contrasted with the light-colored dress she was wearing), but her hair. I referred to her tightly curled, springy black hair a few times, and nobody ever questioned her ethnicity. Eye shape, cheek bones, face shape, and most especially hair (texture, color, style) are all very important - it's not all about skin color!

With that said, one of my ethnicities in my current story is the exception; they're pretty much all about skin color. I always thought it was funny that Snow White's skin had to be literally snow white, and her hair as black as ebony (with red lips, of course), so I invented a culture of people that nearly fit the Snow White look. Whenever I mention that someone is from that country, you know they have black hair and extremely pale skin. Another country's people always only have brown or blond hair and always freckles. One country's people always have charcoal or grey hair. I don't actually know what color their skin is - I hadn't thought about it. I may simply leave that to the imagination. If it doesn't matter to the story, I feel like sometimes you don't really need to specify. Let the reader choose - you know?

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I'm sure this has been touched on at some point in this necro'ed discussion (too busy at the moment to read all the way through), but one of the reasons it's important to describe a character's skin tone is that the default description in our world is white. No matter what you see in your head, if we aren't crystal clear that we are describing a person of color, the reader will envision a white person. And the reason we want to avoid using food descriptors for skin color is that it really is considered creepy and fetishizing by many persons of color - not to mention cliché, and I don't throw that word around lightly.

Nimue linked to Writing with Color, a fantastic blog on Tumblr that addresses many of these issues, and one of their arguments is that there are so many other ways to describe PoC skin tones than with food. For example, in our urban fantasy series, we have three black men with different skin tones, terracotta, chestnut, and mahogany, respectively. We make very sure to describe their skin color because we don't want readers to fix a white man in their mental image, and because their skin color does inform on some of their life experiences and how they will react to some things in the plot.

I think most of us know about the controversy surrounding The Hunger Games, when little Rue wasn't sufficiently described in the book and appeared as a young black girl from a predominantly black community in the movie. People went nuts, mostly because they had a little white girl fixed in their heads as the default descriptor. Katniss herself is a woman of color, and is described as such, but people still see her as white to the point that a white woman was cast for the movie roll because the writer did not make it clear enough.

Getting descriptions right is important, because readers want to be able to see themselves in the characters they read. Representation is the silver bullet to positive self esteem in children and adults, especially in a world where media is dominated by white faces.

 

[Svrtnsse]

A while back I wrote an article on the importance of first impressions when writing descriptions, and when doing the research for that I found something that's relevant to this topic. The first two things we notice about someone is their gender and their race (source: What’s in a face?).

If you don't mention skin colour when describing your character, your reader will fill it in on their own, and the character will default to whatever first comes to mind for the reader. It's not an attribute we can leave unmentioned and then fill in later and hope the reader will have imagined the same thing we did.

 

[Devor]

A while back I wrote an article on the importance of first impressions when writing descriptions, and when doing the research for that I found something that's relevant to this topic. The first two things we notice about someone is their gender and their race (source: What’s in a face?).

If you don't mention skin colour when describing your character, your reader will fill it in on their own, and the character will default to whatever first comes to mind for the reader. It's not an attribute we can leave unmentioned and then fill in later and hope the reader will have imagined the same thing we did.

Yeah, I agree, I don't understand the advice of "don't do it." Sure, if most people are the same ethnicity, you don't need to say it over and over. If there's really a minor character, like the bartender, it really might not matter. But for characters of any importance or significance, the idea of not mentioning something, as a rule, doesn't strike me as good advice or good writing.

 

[TheKillerBs]

I'm sure this has been touched on at some point in this necro'ed discussion (too busy at the moment to read all the way through), but one of the reasons it's important to describe a character's skin tone is that the default description in our world is white. No matter what you see in your head, if we aren't crystal clear that we are describing a person of color, the reader will envision a white person.

I've mentioned this before, but readers will envision a white person if you aren't crystal clear you are describing a "person of colour" (I really hate this term, incidentally) if they, themselves, are white too. Absent evidence to the contrary, people tend to default to what they are most familiar with (i.e., their own race). I remember seeing a post from someone saying they thought Hermione could be black, because one of the books describes her as having dark skin, and of course, Hermione has curly hair. Representation is way more important in films and other visual media, where the race of the character is explicit because of the race of the actor - for example, for most of us who grew up with Harry Potter, Hermione will be forever tied to Emma Watson, but that's not on the books themselves.

Even in drawn media, people will tend towards what they're most familiar with. As an example:

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I've mentioned this before, but readers will envision a white person if you aren't crystal clear you are describing a "person of colour" (I really hate this term, incidentally) if they, themselves, are white too. Absent evidence to the contrary, people tend to default to what they are most familiar with (i.e., their own race). I remember seeing a post from someone saying they thought Hermione could be black, because one of the books describes her as having dark skin, and of course, Hermione has curly hair. Representation is way more important in films and other visual media, where the race of the character is explicit because of the race of the actor - for example, for most of us who grew up with Harry Potter, Hermione will be forever tied to Emma Watson, but that's not on the books themselves.

Even in drawn media, people will tend towards what they're most familiar with. As an example:

I think that you're half right. People will absolutely envision what they are most familiar with in media. But they will not always envision themselves, especially not when the majority of the stories they ingest are about white people - white males, for the most part. I like sharing these essays because they speak to the need for representation from a different perspective than my own.

Alternate Visions: Some Musings on Diversity in SF

Transcript of "The danger of a single story"

 

[S.T. Ockenner]

You could just say light brown

 

[A. E. Lowan]

You could just say light brown

Is this gentleman light brown?

 

[pmmg]

I would call him brown but by cultural standards he would be black. I don't think light brown is needed unless he was compared to others who were darker.


Edit: My fault, I did not see this was a larger thread (that is actually kind of a zombie). I thought A.E. Lowan (et al) was asking a direct question, I see now they were not. I avoided this thread way back then and will go back to avoiding it again. These types of threads IMO tend to focus on the wrong kind of energy and I generally prefer to pass on them.

 

[Devor]

Is this gentleman light brown? View attachment 2659

According to Crayola he is... maybe “extra deep almond”? Anyways they recently released a box of skin color crayons so there is now a kind-of standard. It's all variations of rose, golden and almond.

:edit:

 

[A. E. Lowan]

According to Crayola he is... maybe “extra deep almond”? Anyways they recently released a box of skin color crayons so there is now a kind-of standard. It's all variations of rose, golden and almond.

:edit:

Yeah, I think you're right. He's definitely extra deep almond, or as we describe him in our books, mahogany. The point is, you can't just use a single term such as "light brown" to describe skin tone. Personally, I have alabaster skin with a swarm of freckles waiting to merge.

Also, I love these crayons.

Plus, does this thread count as a double necro? Cus wow.