White Ivy and Physical Description
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Certain contemporary genres embrace physical description, but others kind of... don't. I have noticed in my teaching that a lot of writers are afraid to write very much of it. Maybe they think it's old-fashioned to dwell on noses and cheekbones. More likely, they don't want to seem shallow. After all, we know we're not supposed to judge people in real life by appearance--isn't a physical description in fiction-making some sort of claim that it's ok to do so?
And yet, the world does judge people this way and to deny that is dangerous. Race, class, gender, disability, body type, and physical attractiveness--we use physical appearance to slot human beings into categories and to discriminate and oppress based on those categories. One job of fiction ought to be to take a good hard look at that.
Beyond the moral implications, a character's appearance can be a critical aspect of who they are in really interesting ways because of the way the world discriminates. Personality is shaped, in part, by how other people treat you--and how they treat you is affected by how you look.
Susie Yang's novel, White Ivy, opens with a stunning physical description that illustrates this complex relation of appearance to personality:
Ivy Lin was a thief but you would never know it to look at her. Maybe that was the problem. No one ever suspected--and that made her reckless. Her features were so average and nondescript that the brain only needed a split second to develop a complete understanding of her: skinny Asian girl, quiet, overly docile around adults in uniforms. She had a way of walking, shoulders forward, chin tucked under, arms barely swinging, that rendered her invisible in the way of pigeons and janitors.
Ivy would have traded her face a thousand times over for a blue-eyed, blond-haired version like the Satterfield twins, or even a red-headed, freckly version like Liza Johnson, instead of her own Chinese one with its too-thin lips, embarrassingly high forehead, two fleshy cheeks like ripe apples before the autumn pickings. Because of those cheeks, at fourteen years old, she was often mistaken for an elementary school student--an unfortunate hindrance in everything except in thieving, in which her childlike looks were a useful camouflage.
Ivy's only source of vanity was her eyes. They were pleasingly round, symmetrically situated, cocoa brown in color, with crescent corners dipped in like the ends of a stuffed dumpling. Her grandmother had trimmed her lashes when she was a baby to "stimulate growth," and it seemed to have worked, for now, she was blessed with a flurry of thick, black lashes that other girls could only achieve with copious layers of mascara, and not even then. By any standard, she had nice eyes--but especially for a Chinese girl--and they saved her from an otherwise plain face.
I love the way the passage acknowledges that people's assessment of Ivy's appearance has shaped who she is--and also that she is aware of how they see her and actively using it for her purposes. The description doesn't look away from the unfairness of the world's judgment of her, but this character leverages that unfairness powerfully.
The passage also uses some great strategies to keep the reader intrigued. (Maybe we worry that our descriptions will be boring--not this one!)
First, we've got vivid and unexpected comparisons: the pigeon, the janitor, ripe apples, a stuffed dumpling.
The description is also in motion. One hesitation writers might have about longer passages of description is that they can halt the forward momentum of the story.
Tying description to the forward motion through stakes is a marvelous way to counter that. Ivy's appearance has immediate stakes because it's linked to her stealing, both in how she uses it to her advantage and also how it makes her reckless. And now we know that she is reckless, which creates suspense about how that will play out.
But it's also possible to create a sense of motion inside the description. We don't just get her face in stillness; we get her body walking--the tucking of her chin, the swinging of her arms. It draws the eye and creates a sense of movement--a sort of ripple through the words.
The description is also in motion through time. We learn about how her lashes were trimmed when she was a baby and then grew back. Her face is not still, but dynamic, as she grows up.
When strangers take a split second to stereotype Ivy, it's also movement--of opinion. And it happens again when people assume she must be younger than she is. So we're seeing not just how her appearance affects her circumstances (which relates to both character and stakes), but small actions popping in response to the way she looks.
It's also in motion because this description is not only about what she looks like but about her relationship to her appearance. We learn how her appearance has shaped her, how she uses it in powerful ways, and we learn how she feels about her looks--which parts she likes, which parts she hates, and how she wishes she looked instead.
Ivy's yearning to look a different way also allows a useful sort of handle on her appearance--we can see it contrasted to other kinds of faces. And so Ivy's face doesn't appear in a vacuum but as part of a larger world--and we feel the tension of her existence within that world.
And then I want to talk for just a moment about this delicious voice and its particular usefulness in this context. POV can be a hindrance to physical description. If you are in a first-person or third-limited view, it can feel strange to describe the main character without strutting them past a mirror or making them seem vain. Even then--no one is all that reliable when it comes to their own face.
But this voice is something else, something slippery. Third-person, sure. And it knows Ivy's thoughts, but I wouldn't call it aligned with her. Rather there's a distinct personality to it, as well as an ability to zoom outside of Ivy and give opinions that she doesn't necessarily share. It allows us to see each aspect of her face, but zoomed out and with a useful perspective about how different people react to those features, how Ivy reacts to them, and how it all intersects to influence her greater character.
Her appearance is not all that Ivy is--and that is immediately obvious--but it's played a clear role in shaping her and for that reason, it becomes an important part of the way we understand this character, as well as an intriguing introduction to the rest of the story.