This has always been the biggest issue for me. Frankly I don't have a good grasp for how to describe characters' physical appearance. One of my biggest hangups is that I don't want to do it using words that aren't commonly used, because if I have to learn a bunch of new uncommon words to describe somebody, how am I supposed to expect my readers to understand my descriptions? And yet that seems to be the way characters are usually described. Another issue is that while I have a good general mental image of my characters, when I try to actually focus on that image to describe it, the details in my mind get blurry and hard to make out. Anyone have any advice for me on how to deal with this?
You don't have to learn a bunch of new words to describe a character. That's not even how characters are described so I don't know why you think an ornate vocabulary is usually used when it comes to physical description. Also, don't feel like you need to paint a picture of your character down to the T. What's important to the story? Start there and go with that.
You don't generally want to describe characters--you give characters a few (very few) defining characteristics, and then you let the reader build their own image of the character based on that. In Harry Potter, Mr. Dursely (I think that's his name? ...Harry's shitty uncle) gets described in like one sentence as a guy with no neck. That's the whole thing. You should know what the character looks like. Envision them, give the reader one or two important pieces of that vision, and then don't mention any of the rest. The last thing you want is for the reader to get to the end of the book and you suddenly drop the fact that this character has blond hair for the first time and they go, "Wtf? No they fucking don't."
I'm not exactly necessarily disagreeing with you, but I don't know that much about what the characters look like in my current thing. Some of them I can visualize but I decline to get closer and demand detail. Some are essentially a blur. For some, I'm close enough to look at someone and say that that someone specific could be, say, a cousin. (For example, Hans Gruber from Die Hard could be Swietek's cousin.) I'm consciously and deliberately not nailing down their appearance right now. I'm not sure why.
Don't worry about trite expressions, if you need to use something that is common, to describe a person, then by god use it. I was once stifled (that happens a lot) by someone saying I had a lot of glib or trite expressions in a story. The question is, how do you write a story in a modern setting and not use common verbiage.
Hey, Chicken, that's a good point. I usually don't know much (if anything) beyond the details I provide the reader. But, then, I catch a lot of flak for that, too.
I think you should only describe things which are important to the characters. That applies to description of locations, objects and other characters. If a certain attribute isn’t important to the POV character then the reader doesn’t need to be told about it.
I'm not really on the team of not describing characters. That's because everything about a character says something about who they are from the way they speak, to the way they stand, to the clothes they wear, to what they look like. However, there is a such thing as overdoing it, and I do agree that what you describe should be important in some way. I never have a problem when an author stops to let us know what a character looks like as long as it fits in naturally and it doesn't go on forever. A few descriptions to paint a picture of what this person looks like is enough. You also want to keep in mind the POV character. Someone who is just friends with another person probably wouldn't be describing how beautiful their eyes are unless they have a romantic attraction. While I loved The Outsiders, S.E Hinton went a little over board, in my opinion, on how handsome the other boys were, and I kept thinking to myself that Ponyboy is in love with all of them. Even his own brother. But yeah, don't get too caught up in describing characters. While I think it's good to add little description just to give us an idea of what they look like, no need to describe every little detail.
Huh. I guess I had really gotten the wrong impression of what was the right idea to do. Thanks for the advice, everyone!
Stories are about characters. That means everything you tell the reader should be of significance to the characters in some way. If it isn’t, you don’t need to waste time telling them. They’ll work that stuff out for themselves.
