Mirrors in many guises: describing viewpoint characters

Many moons ago, when I worked at Mills & Boon, one of the per-book jobs was the cover brief form, giving details about the MCs: eye colour, hair colour and style, age, etc. Mostly authors went wildly overboard. (“She has auburn hair with golden notes in an asymmetrical pixie cut—NB THIS IS SHORTER ON THE LEFT SIDE—and a constellation of freckles on her uptilted nose” like mate, you have noticed the covers are stock photos, yes?)

But one particular author wouldn’t do it at all. Just left it blank. And the reason she would not is, she believed that a reader should be able to insert herself (it was always ‘her’) into the story as the heroine, and thus a blonde white woman shown on the cover or described in the text would be offputting to those who aren’t blonde and white.

There are hilariously many things wrong with this, not least the idea that all romance readers want books to be a mirror, not a window, to borrow Dr Rudine Sims Bishop’s wonderful insight. Also, the author’s dislike of things on covers extended to landscapes and objects, at which point you might well ask what the hell she did want her books to look like. (I never found out.) Far more importantly, though: bodies affect how people exist and are treated. She was writing conventionally beautiful white able-bodied cis women, no matter if she didn’t say so outright. Her characters didn’t become mirrors for people who are black or brown or Asian or fat or disabled or trans just because she didn’t specify the heroine’s hair.

(I’m not saying every book has to be a window, obviously, far less that, eg, black MCs always have to be shown interacting with racism, or any such thing. I’m just saying that her refusal to describe the heroine was not the act of allyship she insisted it was.)

You might think this lack of description would be gratingly obvious in the text. In fact it wasn’t, or rather not immediately, largely because she always wrote single viewpoint third person--the story entirely narrated from one MC’s perspective. So her heroines had eyes that the heroes gazed into, and lips that parted involuntarily when the hero gazed at them--but rarely more than that. They had bodies but the bodies were unspecified, detail-less. They were blanks.

I was musing about this the other day as I redrafted my own third-person single POV manuscript. I like third single, so much that I’ve written seven or so of them. I find it more comfortable than first person, which always makes me feel self-conscious about the act of narrating, and restricting the viewpoint to one MC is a great way to keep things from the reader. However, it does make it very hard to describe the viewpoint character without doing the Mirror Thing.

You know the Mirror Thing:

She checked herself in the mirror, brushing back her golden hair so she could run a mascara wand over the long lashes that framed her sparkling blue eyes, and wondering if her firm breasts would look better in a lower-cut top that showed off more of her pale skin...

You really do not want to have a scene where the MC itemises their appearance as if it’s novel to them unless it is novel to them. (Here I will admit, my latest MS has the VP getting amnesia, so I treated myself to a legitimate Mirror Thing, ahaha.)

Putting that aside, as you should: My Will Darling Adventures, written in third single, comprise three books and two shorts running to the best part of 250K words. In these we get multiple careful descriptions of love interest Kim Secretan’s physique, face, colouring, hair, eyes, voice, et cetera. Against all this, we discover that viewpoint (VP) Will has unruly hair. Wow.

So if Will isn’t gazing at himself in a mirror all day (busy busy, books to sell, villains to stab) how to get the description in there?

Well, for a start, my author wasn’t fully wrong. You don’t have to describe the VP in detail. But you do have to be very aware of their physicality, if they are to become a physical reality to the reader. Just because they aren’t described doesn’t mean they should be a blank. You the author should know what they look like and how their body interacts with the world at large and the other characters, and feed that through the whole book.

Thus with Will Darling: we know he’s white because of, among other things, his interactions with his black best friend. We know his height and body type because of the way he holds himself, uses his body, fits in a bed, compares himself to Kim. We know he’s good-looking, but not model good looks, because of the ways in which other characters respond to him and talk about him and notice him or don’t. We know about his scars because the subject comes up during sex; we know about his hands because Kim talks about his hands.

“And you’re exceedingly hard to resist,” Kim said softly. “Your eyes, your smile, your strength. Your hands.”

“My—” Will couldn’t help looking down at them. They were toughened and battered, scarred with thin white lines and thickened knuckles. Ugly working hands, not like Kim’s elegant manicured ones.

Kim was looking at them too. “Beautiful. Like English oak.”

(Note that the part suggests the whole: I doubt your mental picture of Will from that passage would be, say, Timothee Chalamet.)

A description of the VP conveyed via an expression of love and desire and attention from the other MC is a brilliant two-for-the-price-of-one trick and I commend it to you. But make it specific. I’ve written before about the importance of specificity in romance, and how effective it is to have one character hyperfocus on real individual details. There’s nothing terribly interesting about the hero liking the heroine’s perfect boobs. But when we see him getting weirdly hung up on her bony feet, or the ripples of stretch marks in her thighs like a sea in which he could drown (a Talia Hibbert line that has lived rent free in my head for years), or the little shortsighted blink when she’s taken off her glasses, or some other specific, individual thing that makes her her—that, to me, has real romantic impact. That is someone giving all their attention to another person’s quiddity (a lovely word meaning their thing-ness, the essence of an object).

On top of that, do remember that physicality isn’t only a matter of visuals, and you don’t have to describe your VP completely, either in the narrative or by proxy. In All Of Us Murderers we never establish what colour VP Zeb’s hair is. He has dark hair on the cover because the artist had to pick a colour; as it happens I originally saw him as fair-haired in my head. When we got the cover draft I did a quick check against the book, which was the point I realised I’d never actually mentioned his hair, outside that it needs a cut.

As it happens Zeb has ADHD. I did a fair bit of work with sensitivity readers to try and get his physicality right, and as a result he fidgets and taps and moves and touches a lot. It’s crucial that the reader should feel that with him: far more important in fact that they should feel him than see him. Whereas there was no point at which his hair or eye colour came up as worth remarking on. (That doesn’t mean those things never matter. It depends what your reader needs to understand about the character.)

Down with the Mirror Thing, but don’t settle for blanks. Let your viewpoint character emerge by writing them as a physical being, reflected in the world and the people around them.

All Of Us Murderers
Slippery Creatures (Will Darling 1)
My next book is How To Fake It In Society, out in April

If you like my musings, I’ve got a whole book of them coming! Think, Write, Edit, Romance with Hay House in December 2026; more on this shortly.