27. Along similar lines, do appearances play a big role in your stories? Tell us about them, or if not, how you go about designing your characters.

I’d like to say they don’t, but they do. Ish. I don’t devote large amounts of description (at once) to describing how my characters look, but I do have specific mental images for what my characters look like. It’s along the lines of, if someone were to play my character, who would it be? I like to have a mental image of what my character looks like, in order to describe some feature.

While I may know exactly what a character looks like, I don’t describe him or her as though you’re looking at a photograph. I prefer to describe in snippets, say, “rain dripped off of his aquiline nose” or something to that effect. Later I may mention the character’s eye color (if important, in one of my stories it is important to mention that several characters have the same coloring) or general build.

My thought is, we are largely visual beings. We perceive our world through what we see–why should our characters be any different?