Some years ago I read a great essay about beginning writers trying too hard to make their characters unique. It was called or referred to the Mary Sue archetype as the ‘violet-eyed heroine.’ As I worked to improve my characters from dialog to depth I also wanted physical appearance that was reasonable. This means I want characters across a long story to have a good representative distribution of human features. Eye color is one, as eyes say a lot for people in body language. They are the windows of the soul after all. That led to research on the human eye. Here’s what I found about eye color and it’s distribution in world population. (more…)
Mary Louise Eklund 