Have you ever watched The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland? The movie always fascinated me. It started out in black and white and drab. You had to imagine what the characters looked like and what color their clothes were. You could guess by the lighter shades on the screen what they may be but the grainy, darkness of the beginning forced you to imagine the colors the scene would be. The movie did not give any of that away to you. The scene made you feel sad almost with the farmers living a life that was hard work and a rather small Kansas existence. Then, you are thrown (literally) into the land of imagination where you stored all those colors and it shows you, in a sense, what you would picture if you were in your head coloring the scene yourself.
You have the yellow brick road, so yellow and bright, the munchkins dressed in a green so vibrant and rich. Then...you have the ruby slippers. The red unlike anything you may have actually seen in real life. The ruby slippers are so vivid and dazzling you knew they were a real treasure for Dorothy to guard.
You may be asking why I am recapping The Wizard of Oz and the colors. It is because as you start to write your characters into a chapter one of the most important elements becomes the description. You can give a lot of description so that every wrinkle, mole and eye twitch is revealed for the reader. Or, you can give a small bit of description in the beginning and leave it up to the reader's imagination. One way is more like the beginning of The Wizard of Oz where everything is in shades of gray and it is up to the person watching the movie to add in their colors and descriptions. The other being the opposite once she falls over the rainbow and you get to see how our imaginations of a character can be colorful, vibrant and meaningful.
So, I came to the end of the prologue, finished my edits and was ready to start the first chapter. This was where I would introduce many of the key players in the story. I would also form their world. I would choose a setting and a life for my characters. All of this takes description. The first few lines can be a trigger to set the tone of the action, but it is the first paragraphs and pages that will describe the life you are about to enter. Each scene involves a bit of description.
This is again where my love of words comes in to give a person attributes and a physical appearance that the reader can imagine. I form their world and their home and their relationships and can do this by saying just one phrase or using one color. I mean would the woman in The Wizard of Oz really be scary if she didn't have hair pulled back tight to reveal her thin, drawn face, a pointy nose and a wart right in the middle of that nose. She was thin to the point of being gaunt and dressed always in a thin, black cotton dress that hid any shape she may have. It is the combination of words that create the character. If I said she had long blond hair framing her heart shape face and deep soulful brown eyes and loved to wear pink and then follow that by adding she had a wart on the end of her pointy nose, well, she is not so scary then. Descriptions become important when you are writing your characters into a scene because that can be a way to slyly shape the personalities and scenes that will follow.
When my son was little he would color in his coloring book all the time. He liked to give everything only one color though, purple. The sky was purple, the people were purple, animals were purple. But, if he colored with his mommy we would take and change the sky to different shades of blue. We would make the people all different colors and give the animals unique blends and shades. For me, my characters were a blank page on the coloring book and it was up to me to add in the shades and the colors just as I will be adding in the story.
So I pay homage to Dorothy and those red ruby slippers which would not have meant so much if they were a burnt amber in color and all she did was complain that they were too tight the entire trip down the pea green brick road
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