In a writer’s post I saw the other day, he was unsure how to describe a characters appearance in a story. He didn’t know where to begin, with physical appearance, or their outfit? How much should he describe and what constitutes too much describing.
It’s important to give the readers only what they need to know. Let them use their imagination through character development.
Generally, readers have difficult relating to a perfect character. They want scars, imperfections, and perhaps a hint of the character’s troubled background.
When writing in first person viewpoint, it’s especially good to keep physical appearance brief. People don’t typically go around describing themselves to other people in real life. So too much description can feel inauthentic.
The best way to describe a character’s looks is in a relationship with another character. Here’s an example in the opening lines of bestselling author Shelley Read’s Go As a River:
“He wasn’t much to look at.
Not at first, anyway.
“Pardon,” the young man said, a grim thumb and forefinger tugging at the brim of his tattered red ball cap. “This the way to the flop?”
Within a few words (grime and cap) we can immediately use our imagination to form an impression of the boy. It is a direct approach to describing appearance, given in a few choice words.
Description (both internal and external) can be scattered in small doses throughout a story.
“In the Great Quiet,” a debut novel by Laura Vogt, the main character prepares to run for her share in the Oklahoma land rush of 1893. Her opening lines in Chapter One hint at her character’s troubled past and convey her personal feelings about those days:
“Sometimes I wondered if I was too comfortable with the dark passageways within me. If I knew those secret, unlit spaces too well. But shadows don’t bother me overmuch. And sakes alive, no one was honest with themselves anyhow, everyone creating their own aliases.”
We immediately suspect she must be running a dark past. She’s flawed. Interestingly, we only learn her name on page 11, in dialogue with her brother:
“What in thunder you doing?” I swatted at a cloud of gnats. “Go on–get after your own land.”
“Minnie,” Ezra warned.
I rolled my eyes and kept working.
Vogt describes Minnie’s character and appearance through physical actions in short snippets spread throughout the story:
“I swung down and walked through firey red grass, drenched skirts dragging behind.”
“I lowered my boots back to the earth.”
“I swallowed smoke, my hands shook.”
We learn more of who she is when Stot, (Minnie’s budding love interest) declares:
“No one’s taught you how to be a woman yet.”
The trick is to keep it simple to start. You can always add characteristics later to support the story. A few defining features for each character will spark the reader’s vision. Perhaps note eye color, hair color, build, and one feature that is unique to them, such as a scar, an unusually deep frown, or a crooked brow.
A few tips to follow:
- Each chapter should remain in one character’s viewpoint at a time
- The first few lines of the chapter must clearly identify which character you are portraying
- If writing in first person, the character can only see what a camera would see if filming the scene
- Don’t head hop. Jumping from one character’s viewpoint to another will lose the reader
- Backstory must be used sparingly and should be fully integrated with the present-day storyline.
You might start by writing a list or sketch of character traits and features for your hero. Then try fitting some of the elements into a scene. Writing a single scene takes the pressure away from thinking about the entire story.
Keep writing.
