Characters are made
up of a lot of details: age, weight, eye color, and hair pop to mind
immediately. Do you put much stock into a character's hair? Don't you
think it says something about them if their hair is long or short,
dark or light, streaked or plain, curly or short? Does it say
something about their family, or their independence and confidence?
One
of my books, The
Girl with the Thistle Tattoo, has a
heroine with black hair with blue streaks. Astraea is rebellious and
has a Goth bent. Her blue hair says something very particular about
her.
But men's hair can
be just
as telling. Imagine how you'd feel about a guy who visited the salon
to have his hair streaked every month. Or a guy with really long hair
that he wore in a braid. Would these things give you hints about
their personalities?
I've read any number
of books with heroes whose hair I didn't like. I don't go for blond
guys, for example, so in my mind I changed them to brunettes. That
might be cheating on my part, but I figure the author might rather I
continued buying her books, even if I had to play with a few details.
I'm a natural
redhead, and when I was growing up and first started reading romance
novels, so many of the heroines had red hair! It was much easier to
put myself in their shoes when their hair was the same as mine. Do
you feel that way, too? These days, I'm hesitant to make my heroines
redheads because I don't want them to be
too much like me. Weird how the screw
turns.
So what kind of hair
do you like to see in romance novels? Do you have a favorite hair
type, or are you enraptured with any hair that seems to fit the
character the author designed?
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