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She Lives in My Head But Not on the Paper

I know her…Cassie…my main character. She lives in my head. I am able to see her so clearly that I had ChatGPT create a comic book panel of a certain scene. I could describe her to ChatGPT.

AI-generated comic book page in four panels: a smiling woman in a light-colored blouse between two dark-haired companions faces a stone figure at a desk, knocks with an owl-shaped door knocker, walks through a library, and sits at a round council table with shadowy figures and demon-like creatures.

The woman in the light blue shirt in the center is not Cassie…Chatty (my name for ChatGPT) didn’t emphasize Cassie. Maybe that’s because I have given Chatty more physical descriptions of the other female character than of Cassie.

And then the AutoCrit reckoning…

I never physically described Cassie in my book.

Or even hinted at what she looked like.

She lives in my head but not on the paper. My poor readers.

I put my rough draft of The Split, the first of my paranormal romance series, in AutoCrit as part of my revision process. I started going through the chapters, taking notes, and reading what AutoCrit told me about the chapters. And in one section they provide character analysis. Every single chapter said the same thing about the physical description of my main character, Cassie.

Screenshot of an AutoCrit Chapter 1 character analysis for Cassie, with the line “Physical Description: Not described in this chapter.” highlighted in yellow.

And that goes on for 37 chapters…all saying the same thing, “Not described in this chapter.”

AutoCrit, why do you have to call me out like that?!?!

And yet…

Thank you, AutoCrit, for calling me out like that!

So my question becomes…how can my readers see what I see if I don’t put it in the book?

I think that is one of the strange things about writing a character for years. Cassie is so real to me that I forgot there was a point when she wasn’t real to the reader yet. I already know what her hair looks like when she is irritated. I know what she sees in the mirror. I know what Nathaniel sees when he looks at her. But none of that matters if I never put enough of it on the page for the reader to build their own version of her.

And that’s where I realized the difference between knowing my character and introducing her to someone who doesn’t.

Now that doesn’t mean I need to add a paragraph describing how she looks exactly. There can be hints along the way. Every time I picture how she looks at that moment, I can look for a natural place to add a detail. So during my first revision, I added something simple.

Screenshot of a highlighted rough-draft paragraph from The Split in which Cassie sees her tired face, dark hair, and dark eyes reflected in the elevator mirrors.
Rough draft of The Split by my alter ego, AB Holden…typos and all

Now whether I keep all of this here or it ends up in a Scrivener snapshot (a saved earlier version), I don’t know. But I had to start somewhere because even though I want to trust my reader to follow me through this world, I have to make sure I am showing them the path to stay on. I know the mirror trick is a little obvious, but it was a start.

So think about your reader.

Pick a character.

Search your manuscript for the physical descriptions.

See if what you wrote paints that picture for your reader…because if you didn’t write it, can the reader actually see it?