A useful tool

[muscle16a]

For all you budding authors out there:

Are you trying to make your story as "plausible" as possible?

What am I talking about? Let's take this as an example (from an old old story named "Muscle Cousin" by banania7):

"My name is Brent, Brent Davis, and I am 13 years old. I wear glasses, and usually a shy smile, and I am a semi-geek. I've always been small for my age--not Mini-Me small, but definitely undersized. I stand 5'6", weigh 107 pounds with a good meal in me"

Did anybody catch the error? Yes, that right: A 13 year old who stands 5'6" tall is NOT "small". Not even close. In fact, a 5'6" tall 13 year old boy finds himself in the 90%ile for boys' stature!!! Yes, that's right. This boy is taller than 9 out of 10 of his classmates!!! He's a bit skinny (as 107# is just over the 50%ile for a 13 year old), but not even remotely "undersized" . . . unless he goes to a school filled with Amazons (which, come to think of it, might be a good premise for a new story!).

So how do YOU avoid making this sort of mistake? Try this website:

http://www.chartsgraphsdiagrams.com/...2-20-boys.html

Enjoy!

[howardbeatman]

Thank you! I've noticed that some writers on this site have no knowledge of what measurements of height & weight mean in the real world. The AVERAGE American male is 5'9'', weighing 160-170 lbs. Shaquille O'Neal does not look that big at 300 lbs... but he's seven freakin' feet tall!

Yeah, I know that this is a fantasy porn website... just don't insult the readers...

[Jaypat]

Try googling the average height for a man. It gives you a strikingly different answer than this graph does.

[The Pecman]

There are other references on the web as well. I agree, starting with the basic facts as an average and then moving from there is very useful. I did this in my (still in progress) story Cerulean Project, and made sure the lead characters (two 14-year-olds) started out at the right height and weight. Five chapters in, there on the high side of normal, but I expect this will change, just pushing the bounds of believability a bit.

A lot depends on how hard the writer wants to work at making this stuff believable, or just forcing the reader to buy into pure fantasy. Both can work, if the quality of the writing is good enough.

[nnnrg]

Jaypat - the Center for Disease Control site is one of the more trustworthy places you can go to find this kind of thing. Google pulls together a lot of sites, some of which lack documentation. The least garbled of the first-page-of-results sites, http://www.theaveragebody.com/average_height.php has a redraw of the CDC chart.

[cutlerfan]

The 'Average Body' site is not very good at all. They calculate 35 degrees Celsius as 99 degrees F. It is actually 95 [I did the math]. They mispelled Celsius at least once! It is therefore suspect imho.

[nnnrg]

I agree, cutlerfan. But they were the least garbled, i.e. they had the least outright blatantly wrong stuff, in the first page of results ... except for the center for disease control site. Which honestly I would trust mostly because they publish their data, identify sources, their rules for data gathering, etc.