Guest Post: Beware the Eyes That March... What Eyes Can and Cannot Do in Fiction

Article by Matt Teel

There. I've done it. I've finally made an appointment with my optometrist. After years of editing fiction, I've come to understand that there is something seriously wrong with my eyes.

Client after client describes for me characters whose eyes smolder and joke and play and triumph, yet my eyes don't do any of these things. My eyes look around. And sometimes, if I'm paying attention, they actually see things. But that's all.

I'm pretty sure they're defective.

I noticed how much other people's eyes are capable of a few years ago, when I was editing a science fiction story. The main character, an elf-maiden-warrior-princess, held her sword plaintively in her hand as her eyes marched around the walls.

This was a revelation! First, I didn't know you could hold a sword plaintively. That's no mean trick: those things are heavy. But second, my eyes have never marched. Not once, unless they did it behind my back. Here was an author whose character's eyes marched. My eyes didn't so much as skip.

My eyes do register surprise sometimes—I have photographic proof of that, from the time my daughter jumped out from behind the couch with her camera. And they glare. Boy, do they glare! Just yesterday they glared at a man in the express lane, who had twenty items when the sign said no more than seven. My eyes glared quite intently. I was proud of them. But the man didn't hurry up. No chill traveled down his spine, causing him to look around and scurry away. That's what I wanted to happen. Mostly, he just ogled the women on the magazine covers.

(That's something my eyes do too: they ogle. Sometimes they ogle when they're not supposed to, which usually gets me in trouble.)

I stood at the mirror the other morning and tried to get my eyes to smolder. Nothing. I tried to get them to deny others their happiness and belittle them, and exult over the death of people I hate. I tried to get them to say something, because people's eyes are always saying something. “His eyes said that he didn't like pizza, but he could learn to like it if it meant that much to me.” But it was too strenuous; I had to take a nap. I know it's possible to do these things, because my clients have apparently met people who can. I just don't know that it's possible for me to do them. I think I need contacts.

One of my clients had a character whose eyes burned. Not 'burned with desire' or 'burned with the intensity of a thousand suns.' They just burned. There's an ocular nightmare for you. They burned when she was angry, they burned when she was envious, they burned when she felt sexy. To tell you the truth, I don't remember much about the story—but the image of those burning eyes is still with me. Especially on dark nights when the wind rattles the windows. Sounds like a campfire story: “And then, he opened the door. Standing on the porch was the woman with the burning eyes, and she was envious!” Yikes!

But it's not just that eyes perform all these amazing tricks; it's that everyone seems to notice a lot more about other people's eyes than I do. It amazes me, for example, how many women notice the little flecks of colors in a man's eyes. I didn't even know about eye-flecks until I started editing fiction. I assumed an eye-fleck was that cobwebby thing that floats into your line of sight and makes you rub your eyes. Little did I know, women are trained from an early age to fall in love with men who have colorful flecks in their eyes. One man has steel-blue eyes with brown flecks; another has hazel eyes with flecks of green that make them appear almost gold when he stands with a woman on a beach at sunset.

I don't think I could tell you the color of a woman's eyes thirty seconds after she walks out of the room. I guess I'm too busy ogling her.

So, obviously, I have a problem. But I am doing something about it. I've got an appointment with the doctor Thursday at 3. I plan to ask him for some smoldering eyes with red and green flecks: the kind that march triumphantly around a room and really command people's attention; the kind that say to a woman, “I think dieting is a great idea for others, but not for me;” the kind that say, “Do you have a cat? Because I'm really more of a dog person.”

I just hope he doesn't have any of those burning eyes. Of course, I could always pull them out on camping trips.


Matt Teel is a freelance editor and writer. He is currently a resident writer for Online Schools, which researches areas of higher learning, how to pick an online college, and education. In his spare time, he enjoys listening to classical music and reading biographies of composers.