![]() In a situation where I don’t fit in, I’m focused on the reactions of those around me-or my own reaction to their apprehension-not the colors, sizes, or styles. The same is true for my outfit or surroundings. I also wouldn’t make clear-cut observations about my antagonist’s popularity (though the reader absolutely needs to know these things) because these observations are largely situational and intuitive. I might try to convey a certain attitude with the motion, but I don’t think about the color or the length until it applies to the moment. When I am faced with an apprehensive encounter, I don’t often think about the fact that my hair is faded, or red, or long. Wearing black leather pants and a black tank top, I was a stark contrast to her blingy, Barbie-pink look. Her freckles wrinkled along the bridge of her nose. I tried to keep my cool, tossing my long, faded-red hair over my shoulder as the popular but judgy Sarah raked her critical glare over me. ![]() Take a look at this passage, which features a very common, yet disengaging, pattern of physical description: So how can you get visual imagery across without resorting to a mirror or forced-feeling self-observations? Even then, it must be laced into the scene in a delicate way so the reader does not recognize the author’s desire to show the character’s appearance. But will she notice her own straight, faded-red hair and her clothing choice of the day? Not likely, unless it directly applies to the moment. Your main character will likely notice the thick, curly red hair of the girl she has a crush on. Physical description of a character only matters if your character has a reason to acknowledge it. Image via Pixabay So how do you stay out of the way and give your reader a vivid, visual connection with your characters, without interrupting the flow of the moment? To make an authentic, deeply-connected bond between reader and character, the author must immerse the reader in the character’s voice and stay out of the character’s way. But giving a snapshot not only interrupts the flow of a scene, it also reminds the reader that an author wanted them to see something. I’m sure there’re text editors out there that can show you where those characters are, but an easy way is to paste the text into your browser’s URL and hit enter.Most authors have encountered the advice: “Avoid the dreaded mirror scene!” Why? Because using a mirror to describe your main character is a crutch upon which many authors rely to give their readers a visual snapshot of the characters in a book. The space doesn’t show up in common text editors like Visual Studio/Notepad or even Notepad++. ![]() The zero-width space can be used to enable line wrapping in long words, when using languages that don’t use spaces to separate words. The code ​ is the HTML code for the zero width space. Turns out, some how, a character called a “Zero Width Space” had gotten into the html file. One had random white space separating some text, while the other didn’t. This happened to me at work the other day.įor some reason, two pages which were meant to be almost identical, except for some text, were displaying differently. ![]() As you can see, there is a gap between “123” and “456” on page 2, but not on page 1.
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