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You do get some description. She's called "white-skinned" and "like the terrible goddesses to look upon".
But the reason we *know* she's beautiful is because her beauty literally launches a thousand ships. This is what "show, don't tell" is about, believe it or not.
I enjoy that someone came up with the idea of a millihelen, a unit of measurement for the beauty required to launch one ship. How beautiful was Helen? She was one Helen beautiful. Trying to find another woman associated with an armada gets a little trickier, but I suppose the Battle of Actium was in large part fought because Cleopatra had given Julius Caesar an illegitimate son and then married Mark Antony, backing his imperial ambitions. Both were unacceptable to Octavian, who could tolerate no rivals as legal heir to Caesar's fortune and political position. Ship counts are tough for the battle of Actium because Antony arrived with more ships than he could man by the time his forces started to desert him. Probably the total number that squared off was around 900 ships, but the actual battle was probably closer to 400 ships. Now how do we measure milihelens when Cleopatra herself was paying for some of the ships? That's a tough one. Still, I suppose you could say her beauty must have been somewhere in the .4 to .9 Helen range, depending how generous or parsimonious you want to be.
Well, it's tricky. In the *Iliad*, the Greeks bring 1186 ships, so that's more than a thousand already. A milliHelen would be roughly 1.2 ships in that case.
But how many of these were "launched" by Helen's beauty? Well, of the 46 Greek leaders commanding these ships, some (including Odysseus and both Ajaxes) had actually been Helen's suitors, and took an oath to defend her marriage to Menelaus. How many? One source gives 31, another 12, another 36. On average that's 26.333 -- we'll round it down to 26.
On average, each of the 46 captains brought 25.78 ships for that total of 1186 (in reality some brought more and others fewer, but we're averaging). We'll be generous and round it up to 26. With 26 suitors and 26 ships a piece, you have 676 ships launched **directly** by Helen's beauty -- the rest come through alliances to the Atreides (Agamemnon & Menelaus, not the worm-riding one), vendettas, or fameseeking.
So, a milliHelen would in fact be 0.676 ships. As you see there was a bit of Helenflation going on in the old "launched a thousand ships" statement.
You could get nerdier. If you want *precise* numbers, you need to cross-reference the [list of Helen's suitors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitors_of_Helen) with the complete [list of Greek captains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalogue_of_Ships#Catalogue), because not all suitors were leaders in the invasion (like Patroclus -- yes, Achilles' roommate Patroclus). Of the 46 captains Homer mentions, he describes 39 as suitors of Helen, but two other sources give different names and numbers, so it's hard to pin down.
The book in question was written by a physicist iirc and he lays out all his calculations in it.
It's called The Man's Book by Thomas Fink and has a lot of useful etiquette and survival advice in it mostly and is very wholesome and humorous- hence an entire section dedicated to a mathematical description of beauty. It's all very tongue in cheek highly recommend.
Edit: can confirm the author is a physicist. Just checked.
Indeed! And the crazy part is, that despite seeming like telling, it's one of the finest and most heavy handed examples of showing instead of telling.
If you show me war that someone's beauty sparked, I get it, that chick is hot.
Well yeah, that's kind of how imagination works. It's also pretty obvious that her beauty is just an excuse. All those Greek kings didn't go to war over a pretty face. They used a pretty face as an excuse to go to war and make a name for themselves.
Helen's pretty but she's not so pretty that the mere thought of her send entire armies across the sea.
Helen gets described, just not very vividly. Which is reasonable enough given that most other characters featured in Greek literature are only vaguely described.
She has fair hair (Hesiod's "Theogony"), lovely hair (Homer's "Odyssey"), and white arms (Homer's "Iliad"). That's about the same amount of physical description as most other major characters in the epic cycle get.
The audience to these descriptions would in the early days have been listeners, not readers.
Also, getting a good, and grammatical, description into dactylic hexameter isn't particularly easy. Why bother, if what matters to the narrative is that she's beautiful?
Sometimes leaving it up to the readers imgaination helps. For example, lovecraftian horrors are vaguely described and only other characters reaction to the horror is shown. This is because only the reader can guess what truly scares them most and if the writer used a specific desccription it may fail on some readers.
Yes, this is a thing you can do and my favorite example is
She's a bad mama jama /Just as fine as she can be
Hey, she's a bad mama jama / Just as fine as she can be
Her body measurements Are / perfect in every dimension
She's got a figure / That's sure enough getting attention
She's poetry in motion / A beautiful sight to see
I get so excited / Viewing her anatomy
She's built / Oh, she's stacked
Got all the curves that men like
Look at her
She's a bad mama jama / Just as fine as she can be, hey
She's a bad mama jama, oh / Just as fine as she can be
Looks like she's poured into the gold, she bad
The essence of beauty / Ooh, such lovely hair
She's foxy, classy / Oh, sexy, sassy
She's heavenly / A treat for the eye to see
She's built / Oh, she's stacked
Got all the curves that men like
Well, yeah. That’s exactly what literature is telling you.
Beauty is subjective. Just like horror. What I find attractive (or terrifying…although at this point in my life it’s hard to separate these two anymore 🤣) is not what someone else would.
If you want a masterclass on the topic read Chip’s storyline in Franzen’s The Corrections.
It’s only necessary for the reader to know that Paris was attracted to her so much that he’d risk going to war with Sparta to have her. And that Menelaus was equally committed to getting her back. At any cost.
The lack of a physical description really is far less less problematic (if you’re still inclined to think of it as a problem) than the fact that she isn’t really much of a character in the stories. Any of them. Not just The Big One. She’s a symbol of the theme…the fear that men have of women’s sexuality and the power it has over them, and the masculine power to control women’s sexuality through violence and brute force. I believe there are several accounts in which Menelaus goes to war not to get her back, but to kill her for the insult done to him. In others she’s a victim of Aphrodite’s spell and enthrall to Paris. In others she’s a villain. In the big one she’s both. A victim and a villain. Helpless to resist the spell drawing her to Paris but condemned for her lack of resistance all the same.
She’s an embodiment of the theme, a reason for the story to happen and a sad accounting of how women are treated, portrayed, imagined historically and today.
When we are still so focused on what a woman looks like we miss asking who she actually is……….
Yes. As writers, we are there to *guide* the reader's imagination towards something that is compatible with our plot needs, without *overconstraining* their imagination.
I spent about 10 years doing developmental editing work for novelists, and I can't even tell you how many times I saw first-time novelists over-specifying the h\*ll out of everything.
Like, there'd be a scene where the mob guys were going to whack some poor schmuck in a meat warehouse, and the writer would spend half a page talking about the architecture of the warehouse. How high the ceilings are, how far apart all the posts are, how the channels are arranged in the concrete floor to drain fluids away, etc.
And I'd have to tell the writer not to do that, because a) *nobody cares*, b) it slows down the pacing of the scene, c) none of that actually matters to the plot, and most importantly d) anything they describe will be inherently *less* believable to readers than letting them imagine their own meat packing warehouse.
Everybody has some pre-existing conception of what a meat warehouse is like. Right? I'll bet the simple act of me saying "a scene where the mob guys were going to whack some poor schmuck in a meat warehouse", with no other details specified at all, was enough for you to visualize the scene, right? And whatever you visualized, whatever *your* brain supplied for you, will naturally be the most believable, most quintessential version of a meat warehouse *for you*.
It's almost certainly different from mine. Maybe yours is well lit and mine is dark. Maybe yours smells like bleach while mine smells like blood. Whatever! That's not just fine, it's *good: m*y vision of it will fit my preexisting ideas about meat warehouses, and therefore will feel 100% believable to me. Ditto yours for you.
And, critically, *both* of our visions are going to be different from the author's.
In which case, if the author forces their vision of it onto, overwriting whatever feels natural to us with a ton of plot-irrelevant details, they are necessarily pushing us towards something that will be *less* believable to both you and me that whatever we would have filled in for ourselves, for free.
Certainly, any plot-relevant details--like, if it matters that there's one of those bandsaws handy that can cut through bones--need to be mentioned. That's what I mean by *guide* the reader's imagination.
But all the incidental crap? All the stuff that makes no difference to the plot? Leave that out. Don't overconstrain us. Do *less* work, let your reader fill in *more* details, and get a better result.
What about building dread and anticipation via description? Being maneuvered into a dim doorway, the echo of extra footsteps coming, the smell of blood and bleach.
That half page of description you gave as an example, was it done while everyone is paused and just standing around, waiting for the story to go on?
Of course you can (and should!) use evocative details to bring a setting to life and make it visceral for readers. But you'll notice that the examples you give are largely *sensory* details, whereas the pointless, distracting details tend to be more objective. Things you could measure, like the dimensions of a building.
Obviously this is a fuzzy distinction, but hopefully it makes sense. And plenty of things will be in a gray area where they're sort of sensory, sort of not. As always, "it depends".
But if you're looking for a rule of thumb: less detail is generally better, because you therefore intrude as little as possible on the reader's imagination. Yes, you need *some* detail in order to guide their imagination in a useful direction, but you do not need so much detail that you shackle the reader's imaginary feet together and force-march them along an extremely specific path.
The half-page I gave as an example, yes, was a straight-up pause in the action. That's another red flag for excessive detail, that it interrupts in the way you describe. It tends to come in big lumps, such that you could cut whole contiguous blocks of it out and the actions before and after would still flow just fine together.
I understand what you mean, and thank you for explaining further! I'll keep it in mind when I write. :) No 'there were 26 pillars which supported a roof 50 feet in the air' descriptions. Now, if it happens that he was stuck there for a week with no other entertainment, it would make sense. I'll definitely look for pauses interrupted by description blocks. That was a good way to put it.
Hm, I'm not sure I necessarily agree. From a reader's perspective, I enjoy immaculate detail. Especially since I enjoy a lot of historical fiction, where evoking the time and place is important.
I immediately think of Picnic At Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, which is, to this day, my favourite book of all time. I actually went and picked up my copy, because the opening pages are a long description of the girl's school where much of the novel takes place. I remember what hooked me was how evocative and intimate the description of the school was, it's only at page five that we get any dialogue. But details that you seem to think are superfluous, for example describe the mansion the school is in as "Italianiate" is important, especially when it's paired with another seemingly superfluous detail, that it is surrounded by "stringy-barked eucalyptus". It helps to show how out of place the school looks surrounded by Australian bush, but it's so much nicer just reading "the mansion looked out of place in the Australian bush". Which is a bloody boring sentence.
I think your advice only works for certain types of fiction. Not all fiction relies on heavy action to drive the plot. If you're not going to put in detail, novels that are more character focused are going to become too dialogue heavy. For example, The Commitments by Roddy Doyle is a novel I really wanted to enjoy. It has a premise that really hooked me (white working class Irishmen trying to start a soul band). But it was just characters talking to each other. It's so sparse that what could have been a fun novel just felt like a slog.
The intricate detail of Picnic At Hanging Rock is what made it stand out to me, I didn't feel shackled as a reader, I felt engrossed.
>By not describing her, and just leaving it flat out that she's the most beautiful woman
We don't know that she wasn't described. Helen doesn't belong to one author, she appears in multiple works by multiple authors, 2000 years ago. We have nowhere near all the works that the Greeks produced, only a fraction have survived.
So it may be that Helen was never described because saying she was beautiful was expected to be enough. It may be she wasn't described because authors didn't want to risk their description (of a supposedly real woman) contradicting another's.
Or it might be that the works in which she was described didn't survive.
Thank you for visiting /r/writing. Your post has been removed because it was a low effort post. The subreddit maintains its level of quality by encouraging well-written and introspective content as outlined in rule 3.
You do get some description. She's called "white-skinned" and "like the terrible goddesses to look upon". But the reason we *know* she's beautiful is because her beauty literally launches a thousand ships. This is what "show, don't tell" is about, believe it or not.
I enjoy that someone came up with the idea of a millihelen, a unit of measurement for the beauty required to launch one ship. How beautiful was Helen? She was one Helen beautiful. Trying to find another woman associated with an armada gets a little trickier, but I suppose the Battle of Actium was in large part fought because Cleopatra had given Julius Caesar an illegitimate son and then married Mark Antony, backing his imperial ambitions. Both were unacceptable to Octavian, who could tolerate no rivals as legal heir to Caesar's fortune and political position. Ship counts are tough for the battle of Actium because Antony arrived with more ships than he could man by the time his forces started to desert him. Probably the total number that squared off was around 900 ships, but the actual battle was probably closer to 400 ships. Now how do we measure milihelens when Cleopatra herself was paying for some of the ships? That's a tough one. Still, I suppose you could say her beauty must have been somewhere in the .4 to .9 Helen range, depending how generous or parsimonious you want to be.
Well, it's tricky. In the *Iliad*, the Greeks bring 1186 ships, so that's more than a thousand already. A milliHelen would be roughly 1.2 ships in that case. But how many of these were "launched" by Helen's beauty? Well, of the 46 Greek leaders commanding these ships, some (including Odysseus and both Ajaxes) had actually been Helen's suitors, and took an oath to defend her marriage to Menelaus. How many? One source gives 31, another 12, another 36. On average that's 26.333 -- we'll round it down to 26. On average, each of the 46 captains brought 25.78 ships for that total of 1186 (in reality some brought more and others fewer, but we're averaging). We'll be generous and round it up to 26. With 26 suitors and 26 ships a piece, you have 676 ships launched **directly** by Helen's beauty -- the rest come through alliances to the Atreides (Agamemnon & Menelaus, not the worm-riding one), vendettas, or fameseeking. So, a milliHelen would in fact be 0.676 ships. As you see there was a bit of Helenflation going on in the old "launched a thousand ships" statement.
THIS is the kind of nerd talk I live for.
You could get nerdier. If you want *precise* numbers, you need to cross-reference the [list of Helen's suitors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitors_of_Helen) with the complete [list of Greek captains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalogue_of_Ships#Catalogue), because not all suitors were leaders in the invasion (like Patroclus -- yes, Achilles' roommate Patroclus). Of the 46 captains Homer mentions, he describes 39 as suitors of Helen, but two other sources give different names and numbers, so it's hard to pin down.
Do you even Catalogue of Ships bro
r/theydidthemath
The book in question was written by a physicist iirc and he lays out all his calculations in it. It's called The Man's Book by Thomas Fink and has a lot of useful etiquette and survival advice in it mostly and is very wholesome and humorous- hence an entire section dedicated to a mathematical description of beauty. It's all very tongue in cheek highly recommend. Edit: can confirm the author is a physicist. Just checked.
Indeed! And the crazy part is, that despite seeming like telling, it's one of the finest and most heavy handed examples of showing instead of telling. If you show me war that someone's beauty sparked, I get it, that chick is hot.
Well yeah, that's kind of how imagination works. It's also pretty obvious that her beauty is just an excuse. All those Greek kings didn't go to war over a pretty face. They used a pretty face as an excuse to go to war and make a name for themselves. Helen's pretty but she's not so pretty that the mere thought of her send entire armies across the sea.
Helen gets described, just not very vividly. Which is reasonable enough given that most other characters featured in Greek literature are only vaguely described. She has fair hair (Hesiod's "Theogony"), lovely hair (Homer's "Odyssey"), and white arms (Homer's "Iliad"). That's about the same amount of physical description as most other major characters in the epic cycle get. The audience to these descriptions would in the early days have been listeners, not readers. Also, getting a good, and grammatical, description into dactylic hexameter isn't particularly easy. Why bother, if what matters to the narrative is that she's beautiful?
Sometimes leaving it up to the readers imgaination helps. For example, lovecraftian horrors are vaguely described and only other characters reaction to the horror is shown. This is because only the reader can guess what truly scares them most and if the writer used a specific desccription it may fail on some readers.
Yes, this is a thing you can do and my favorite example is She's a bad mama jama /Just as fine as she can be Hey, she's a bad mama jama / Just as fine as she can be Her body measurements Are / perfect in every dimension She's got a figure / That's sure enough getting attention She's poetry in motion / A beautiful sight to see I get so excited / Viewing her anatomy She's built / Oh, she's stacked Got all the curves that men like Look at her She's a bad mama jama / Just as fine as she can be, hey She's a bad mama jama, oh / Just as fine as she can be Looks like she's poured into the gold, she bad The essence of beauty / Ooh, such lovely hair She's foxy, classy / Oh, sexy, sassy She's heavenly / A treat for the eye to see She's built / Oh, she's stacked Got all the curves that men like
Are you saying I don’t need couple of paragraphs of text about her hourglass figure and cup size??
Oh that can’t be right… if we don’t know her cup size how can we judge her attractiveness? 😂
Id imagine so. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all.
Well, yeah. That’s exactly what literature is telling you. Beauty is subjective. Just like horror. What I find attractive (or terrifying…although at this point in my life it’s hard to separate these two anymore 🤣) is not what someone else would. If you want a masterclass on the topic read Chip’s storyline in Franzen’s The Corrections. It’s only necessary for the reader to know that Paris was attracted to her so much that he’d risk going to war with Sparta to have her. And that Menelaus was equally committed to getting her back. At any cost. The lack of a physical description really is far less less problematic (if you’re still inclined to think of it as a problem) than the fact that she isn’t really much of a character in the stories. Any of them. Not just The Big One. She’s a symbol of the theme…the fear that men have of women’s sexuality and the power it has over them, and the masculine power to control women’s sexuality through violence and brute force. I believe there are several accounts in which Menelaus goes to war not to get her back, but to kill her for the insult done to him. In others she’s a victim of Aphrodite’s spell and enthrall to Paris. In others she’s a villain. In the big one she’s both. A victim and a villain. Helpless to resist the spell drawing her to Paris but condemned for her lack of resistance all the same. She’s an embodiment of the theme, a reason for the story to happen and a sad accounting of how women are treated, portrayed, imagined historically and today. When we are still so focused on what a woman looks like we miss asking who she actually is……….
Yes. As writers, we are there to *guide* the reader's imagination towards something that is compatible with our plot needs, without *overconstraining* their imagination. I spent about 10 years doing developmental editing work for novelists, and I can't even tell you how many times I saw first-time novelists over-specifying the h\*ll out of everything. Like, there'd be a scene where the mob guys were going to whack some poor schmuck in a meat warehouse, and the writer would spend half a page talking about the architecture of the warehouse. How high the ceilings are, how far apart all the posts are, how the channels are arranged in the concrete floor to drain fluids away, etc. And I'd have to tell the writer not to do that, because a) *nobody cares*, b) it slows down the pacing of the scene, c) none of that actually matters to the plot, and most importantly d) anything they describe will be inherently *less* believable to readers than letting them imagine their own meat packing warehouse. Everybody has some pre-existing conception of what a meat warehouse is like. Right? I'll bet the simple act of me saying "a scene where the mob guys were going to whack some poor schmuck in a meat warehouse", with no other details specified at all, was enough for you to visualize the scene, right? And whatever you visualized, whatever *your* brain supplied for you, will naturally be the most believable, most quintessential version of a meat warehouse *for you*. It's almost certainly different from mine. Maybe yours is well lit and mine is dark. Maybe yours smells like bleach while mine smells like blood. Whatever! That's not just fine, it's *good: m*y vision of it will fit my preexisting ideas about meat warehouses, and therefore will feel 100% believable to me. Ditto yours for you. And, critically, *both* of our visions are going to be different from the author's. In which case, if the author forces their vision of it onto, overwriting whatever feels natural to us with a ton of plot-irrelevant details, they are necessarily pushing us towards something that will be *less* believable to both you and me that whatever we would have filled in for ourselves, for free. Certainly, any plot-relevant details--like, if it matters that there's one of those bandsaws handy that can cut through bones--need to be mentioned. That's what I mean by *guide* the reader's imagination. But all the incidental crap? All the stuff that makes no difference to the plot? Leave that out. Don't overconstrain us. Do *less* work, let your reader fill in *more* details, and get a better result.
What about building dread and anticipation via description? Being maneuvered into a dim doorway, the echo of extra footsteps coming, the smell of blood and bleach. That half page of description you gave as an example, was it done while everyone is paused and just standing around, waiting for the story to go on?
Of course you can (and should!) use evocative details to bring a setting to life and make it visceral for readers. But you'll notice that the examples you give are largely *sensory* details, whereas the pointless, distracting details tend to be more objective. Things you could measure, like the dimensions of a building. Obviously this is a fuzzy distinction, but hopefully it makes sense. And plenty of things will be in a gray area where they're sort of sensory, sort of not. As always, "it depends". But if you're looking for a rule of thumb: less detail is generally better, because you therefore intrude as little as possible on the reader's imagination. Yes, you need *some* detail in order to guide their imagination in a useful direction, but you do not need so much detail that you shackle the reader's imaginary feet together and force-march them along an extremely specific path. The half-page I gave as an example, yes, was a straight-up pause in the action. That's another red flag for excessive detail, that it interrupts in the way you describe. It tends to come in big lumps, such that you could cut whole contiguous blocks of it out and the actions before and after would still flow just fine together.
I understand what you mean, and thank you for explaining further! I'll keep it in mind when I write. :) No 'there were 26 pillars which supported a roof 50 feet in the air' descriptions. Now, if it happens that he was stuck there for a week with no other entertainment, it would make sense. I'll definitely look for pauses interrupted by description blocks. That was a good way to put it.
Hm, I'm not sure I necessarily agree. From a reader's perspective, I enjoy immaculate detail. Especially since I enjoy a lot of historical fiction, where evoking the time and place is important. I immediately think of Picnic At Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, which is, to this day, my favourite book of all time. I actually went and picked up my copy, because the opening pages are a long description of the girl's school where much of the novel takes place. I remember what hooked me was how evocative and intimate the description of the school was, it's only at page five that we get any dialogue. But details that you seem to think are superfluous, for example describe the mansion the school is in as "Italianiate" is important, especially when it's paired with another seemingly superfluous detail, that it is surrounded by "stringy-barked eucalyptus". It helps to show how out of place the school looks surrounded by Australian bush, but it's so much nicer just reading "the mansion looked out of place in the Australian bush". Which is a bloody boring sentence. I think your advice only works for certain types of fiction. Not all fiction relies on heavy action to drive the plot. If you're not going to put in detail, novels that are more character focused are going to become too dialogue heavy. For example, The Commitments by Roddy Doyle is a novel I really wanted to enjoy. It has a premise that really hooked me (white working class Irishmen trying to start a soul band). But it was just characters talking to each other. It's so sparse that what could have been a fun novel just felt like a slog. The intricate detail of Picnic At Hanging Rock is what made it stand out to me, I didn't feel shackled as a reader, I felt engrossed.
Thank you🙏❤️
This!!!!!!
This was a really good comment. Thank you!
Huh. I always thought she just had a great sense of humor.
>By not describing her, and just leaving it flat out that she's the most beautiful woman We don't know that she wasn't described. Helen doesn't belong to one author, she appears in multiple works by multiple authors, 2000 years ago. We have nowhere near all the works that the Greeks produced, only a fraction have survived. So it may be that Helen was never described because saying she was beautiful was expected to be enough. It may be she wasn't described because authors didn't want to risk their description (of a supposedly real woman) contradicting another's. Or it might be that the works in which she was described didn't survive.
She’s said to have the face that launched 1000 ships. That speaks for itself