Physical features can be used to show rather than tell us things about characters. One of the most important lessons in learning how to write a book is the ability to draw readers into your fictional world. When describing a character, eyes are often writers’ go-to features. As the old saying goes, the eyes are the mirrors of the soul, and therefore, eyes can be particularly powerful tools for conveying information about a character.
When using eyes or indeed any physical feature to tell about a character, it’s important to keep a few points in mind.
• Avoid clichés about eyes. This goes for all physical descriptions; the important thing to remember is that all beautiful people are not good and all ugly people are not evil. For example, don’t give a shifty character or bad guy small, beady eyes. It’s simply too obvious.
• On the other hand, shorthand may be okay in small doses. There are somewhat common ways of describing eyes that can be useful for conveying information quickly. For example, using ‘clear-eyed’ to describe a character who normally has dementia in a moment of clarity is a good way to quickly signal that shift into clarity to the reader.
• Use descriptions of the eyes in unexpected ways. There are a couple of ways you can do this. It’s possible to subvert the reader’s expectations in a chilling way by describing the eyes in a way that is in contrast with the character’s intentions. For example, you might have an evil character threaten violence with a calm, gentle or loving look in their eyes. The second way in which you can do this is by giving unexpected information about a character using the eyes. A character who initially appears slow or stupid might have bright or intelligent eyes that belie that initial impression. Don’t make associations so bizarre that they distract the reader, of course, but you can use the eyes to subtly show instead of tell something about a character.
• Use the characters’ eyes as the eyes of the reader as well. Or, in other words, use the character’s gaze to show the reader what is important in a scene. What does the character look at? What catches the character’s attention and holds it?
• On the other hand, don’t overuse eyes or any other physical description. At some point in the process of revising your manuscript, it’s a good idea to go through and look at your use of gestures and phrases. If all of your characters are furrowing their brows every time they are in deep thought or if you have characters turning and looking every few pages, you may have a problem. Of course, these are exactly the types of tics the revision process is meant to weed out, so don’t worry about it too much on your initial draft.
• Watch out for unintentionally funny actions or descriptions. The danger in writing about eyes is that we tend to make them go all sorts of places, and this can lead us into trouble. An oft-repeated sentence that demonstrates this is ‘His eyes slid down the front of her dress’. Make sure your characters’ eyes stay firmly in their sockets.
• Don’t mix or overextend metaphors. This is good writing advice in general, but as with the sliding eyes mentioned above, something about eyes seems to make us particularly tempted to relinquish control and let our metaphors run wild. This may be due to the emphasis we put on eyes as particularly revealing, but whatever the reason, it’s something that we as writers must be vigilant against.
• Use eyes to convey depths of unexpressed emotion. Restrained emotion can sometimes be more affecting for the reader than
drawing eyes
full-on expressions of grief, love or other strong feelings. And in real life, it’s often our eyes that give us away when we try to deceive others. Think about how you can exploit this in your fiction to show the ways in which your characters may be conflicted or attempting to conceal something from others.
We often think of our eyes as powerful indicators of our real feelings, and scientific research suggests that this belief may not be unfounded. From the idea many cultures hold about the evil eye to assumptions such as expecting someone with bright and sparkling eyes to also be lively and gregarious, the eyes have powerful associations that fiction writers can use.