Challenge to writers: describe your characters (esp female ones) without ever describing their general attractiveness…none of: cute, sexy, beautiful/gorgeous/ugly, appealing, etc. Instead, describe their features, and let the audience/other characters (through their interactions) make their own judgments about those features. Aside from being meatier (show, don’t tell), this may help you avoid stereotyping features as “pretty/ugly”–different people are attracted to different things, so why should your characters be different, right? Explore attractiveness of a wide variety of features, explore attractiveness as an opinion that some characters have and some don’t, explore attractiveness as something that isn’t just a convention everyone agrees on
Great advice! Called subjective description.
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
