Story Building Blocks: Game On!: Character Descriptions

Creative character descriptions are hard to master.

There are long debates about how much character description is enough and how much is too much. Some readers want to know hair and eye color, height and weight, etc. Some want to fill in their own details.

Not enough detail and you have talking heads.

Too much detail and you turn some readers off.

The choice is yours. Write what you enjoy reading.

Either way, you have to define your character in a way that makes the reader care what happens to him.

An important consideration when describing characters is the viewpoint lens filtering the information. Self-description is tricky and often results in narrator intrusion.

1. Dick can compare and contrast himself to someone else.

He was five-six maybe five seven, coming up to my shoulder. His hair was buzzed like mine, which used to indicate military but had become a recent fad. He could be bulked up from training like me or a gym membership. It was hard to tell these days.

2. Someone can insult or praise Dick's appearance.

“Your nose looks like you head-butted a rhino, your big brown eyes are bloodshot, and that dimple doesn’t make up for the weakness of your chin.”

3. The three-item list is a little on-the-nose, but employed often.

Dick was a thirty-five-year-old with a pot belly and no hair.

If this is in Dick's POV, it is narrator intrusion. Dick would not talk about himself that way. But a secondary POV character could describe him:

Dick turned out to be a thirty-five year-old with a pot belly and no hair. His wide blue eyes and plump lips completed the resemblence to a man-sized toddler.

4. A unique voice makes descriptions pop.

He had the kind of face that would render him boyish well into old age: round blue eyes, fair wavy hair, freckled nose, and baby smooth skin, the kind of face that would age quickly overnight, as if a witch's spell had broken. The transition would be quick and painful.

5. Mirror gazing is considered cliché, but character self-description is done.

Rather than a list, add a little attitude.

Christ, I was getting old. My hair had more gray than brown and was receding faster than the ocean at low tide. The bags and sags on my face made it harder to shave. My eyebrows had taken on a life of their own. The guy in the mirror wasn't me. It was some old fart sitting in a park feeding pigeons.

6. Avoid narrator intrusion.

The following descriptions are narrator intrusion in anything other than omniscient POV.

1. Dick's blue eyes lit up when he saw Sally.

Sally could see his blue eyes light up. An omniscient narrator could say it. A first or third person narrator would not.

2. Dick stared at his handsome reflection in the dresser mirror. His eyes were blue. His nose was crooked. His chin was dimpled.

This is you, the author, telling us what Dick looked like.

7. Sense of character trumps details.

You need to give your reader a firm idea of who they are dealing with more so than the color of his eyes, especially when you choose the vague description technique.

Is Dick harsh and judgmental, sweet and lazy, or coarse and fun-loving? The reader fills in whether she thinks that person is corpulent or thin, attractive or not, based on the way the character presents himself.

It creates dissonance when a character's physical description counters what the reader feels about him. This can be done accidentally or on purpose.

8. Make your characters authentic from the ground up.

As outlined in Story Building Blocks II and Story Building Blocks Build A Cast Workbook, it is useful to assign each main character a personality type. The traits propel them and affect the way other people see them. Temperament types are universal, but you can warp and shape them in hundreds of ways. This may sound like too much work, but it is well worth it to do the research. Personality types react to each other in different ways and your readers will not be the same temperament type.

The majority of writers employ pedestrian descriptions; those who master the craft are unforgettable.

Related Posts on Character Description:

http://dianahurwitz.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-magic-of-voice-and-r-kahler.html