Gabrielle here!
I’m going to be honest, I don’t like dealing with character descriptions. I’ve read about too many orbs, seen skin and hair color described as food one too many times, and know too much about how various male love interests smell. It can be tough to know how and what to describe without it being distracting. But character description can’t be avoided. We’re not working with a visual medium, so if we want our audience to have an idea of what our character looks like, we have to find a way to write character descriptions without wandering into cliche or writing something distracting. So today, we’re going to talk about why description matters and how to do it well with the help of our character Honey.
Why Description Matters
But Gabrielle, you may be wondering, why do character descriptions matter at all? Why does the audience need to know what the characters look like? Maybe it doesn’t matter if the audience knows your character’s hair color, but there are a number of ways that physical description can help communicate information.
Environment
A character’s description can be used to reveal information about their environment. What people wear and how they wear it communicates a lot about the weather, their socio-economic status, and occupation. A character in a hot climate may have their hair cut short or pulled back to keep them as cool as possible. A rich character may wear jewelry made with precious gems and metals. A character who’s been on the road for months may have worn, stained, and patched up clothing. This can work in a number of ways. It can support the information you’ve already given about the environment or contradict it in a way that reveals something important about the character. For example, if the audience knows that it’s winter or the environment’s really cold, seeing that a character is walking around in shorts without a jacket will catch their attention. Or if it’s been established that wearing red is taboo, showing a character that’s wearing a red handkerchief around their neck will catch the audience’s attention. Also, consider cultural norms around clothing, hairstyles, and other aspects of a character’s appearance. You can communicate a lot about a person’s culture by describing how they dress, and if you do that you can get character description and a bit of exposition out of the way at the same time.
Values
This can go alongside communicating a character’s culture through their appearance. If they value their culture, the character will likely dress in a way that reflects and respects that culture. But if they don’t, they may do whatever they can to rebel against it. Consider how various levels of rebellion would appear physically. But this doesn’t just connect to culture. Consider the other values a character has and how they may impact their appearance. Maybe a character who values their family and has a close relationship with them has their mom braid their hair every morning. Maybe a character’s moral code encourages them to dress modestly. Maybe they wear a symbol of their religion, culture, or order, or a necklace that matches their best friend’s at all times. Regardless, there are a lot of ways to reflect and reinforce what a character values through their appearance.
Personality
Finally, you can reveal a lot about a character’s personality through their appearance. This is perhaps the most straightforward because it’s the thing we’re all the most conscious of. Evaluate how the way you dress reflects your personality. What do the colors, patterns, and styles you wear say about you? Consider how your characters would choose to dress if they were given total freedom. This doesn’t need to be how they always dress, but it’s good to know what this is so you have a better understanding of how they’d like to appear even with limitations. Let’s talk about school uniforms to show this idea. A student who prides themselves on following the rules and puts a lot of their identity into being a model student will have a neatly pressed uniform with no extra jewelry or other accessories. Other students that value the rules but are more laid back might keep the dress code, but wear socks that are their favorite color. Another student may wear a beloved friendship necklace under their clothes. A student who’s trying to rebel might wear jewelry or dye their hair in a ways that obviously break the dress code. And a student who’s too tired to care might be wearing their shirt backwards or not have all the buttons done up. Even if the character is limited in what they can wear, how they wear things can reflect a lot about their personality.
Symbolism
So now that we’ve examined the different things physical description can reveal about characterization, we’re going to look at how a character’s appearance can help with storytelling. A character’s appearance can symbolize their current state and role in the story. By current state, I mean consider how you can use physical descriptions to show how your character’s feeling. An exhausted character may have bags under their eyes or unkempt hair, a character in mourning may wear only black, and a hopeless romantic may have flowers in their hair. All of these details clue the audience into the character’s emotional state.
In terms of story role, I’m talking about the ways a character’s appearance can hint at their significance in the story. This is the “pink haired anime hero” way of looking at appearance. Yeah, that can be a little too on the nose, but there are more subtle ways to do this. Maybe there’s a lost bloodline that has heterochromia, and you can foreshadow that your character is part of that bloodline by describing them early in the story as having this trait. Maybe your character being the only one in their family with freckles adds to the theme of them feeling like an outsider. This also can be helpful with representing where your character is in their arc. I love doing this in my writing. Characters get new outfits, haircuts, and accessories all the time in my stories when they go through a change. There are a lot of different ways to do this with varying levels of subtlety. Maybe your character removing a piece of jewelry with their kingdom’s crest represents the moment in their arc where they abandon their previous loyalties. Maybe your character pulls the classic “giving yourself a haircut during a breakdown.” Regardless of your method, consider how you can use small details in a character’s appearance to communicate your character’s importance or show their progress.
How to Integrate Descriptions
So we’ve talked about all the ways appearance can be helpful, but that doesn’t solve the original problem. How can writers integrate physical descriptions in ways that feel natural? So we’re going to show some examples with Honey.
Going through the categories quickly, like you’ve seen in the illustrations, Honey’s got short curly blonde hair, dark green eyes, fair skin, and freckles. She wears a sage green headscarf, and a green and brown peasant girl outfit. Her outfit reflects her location—small village—and she dresses in a similar color palette and style to the rest of her family—reflecting her focus on her family. So with all that in mind, here are some ways that we could integrate physical description.
I’m personally a fan of action tags. For those who may not be familiar, action tags are character actions that accompany dialogue. These keep your novel from having long stretches where characters are just talking, which can increase the pacing too much and result in readers skimming.
“What are you doing?” Honey pushed a gold curl back under her handkerchief.
Another strategy I use is finding ways to make character descriptions relevant to the story. That way I’m not pausing the story to describe something.
“Look out!”
Honey whipped around, but not in time to avoid the spray of mud. She grabbed a handful of now-soaked hair. There was no hint of gold underneath the thick coat of mud. She sighed. It was going to take forever to get the dirt out of her curls.
Keep in mind your point of view when you’re writing character descriptions. If you’re writing in first person or a very psychically close third person limited perspective, certain kinds of physical description would sound odd. For example, a description like this sounds a little off:
I widened my green eyes as my cheeks went pink.
My rule when writing descriptions in these POVs is I keep in mind what my character can see. Since we're looking through the character's eyes, there shouldn't be a description outside of what the characters can see. In these POVs a character can’t see their own eye color, so I won’t have them comment on it. But they can see their clothes, the rest of their body, and potentially their hair if it’s long enough. So I might do something like this:
My eyes dropped to my hands as heat rose in my face. I focused on tracing the freckles on the back of my hand. Anything was better than meeting his eye.
Also, remember that your audience likely won’t remember every physical detail right away. Give your audience reminders of what a character looks like throughout the story. Don’t over do it, but use your discretion to find times to reference elements of your character’s appearance. This is why I like using action tags so much because they lend themselves well to short descriptions.
A final tip I have is to remember that not all physical features should be treated equally. Like I mentioned earlier, your audience won’t be able to remember all details equally. I recommend finding a few key traits that are important for you that the audience remembers and reference them more frequently. This would probably be the things that connect to symbolism in your story. And if you're writing a speculative fiction story where a character has a trait that's unique to this world—wings, natural green hair, scales, glow-in-the-dark freckles, etc.—I recommend referencing this trait more often because it's something that will make your character stand out and it will likely be a trait your audience isn't immediately used to.
With Honey, in the beginning it would be important to highlight her outfit—a simple peasant girl outfit—to emphasize her role in the story and her want like we discussed in our want vs. need post. I would also focus on her hair. Not only does the color reflect her sunshiny personality, but it can be a good way to track her mood. She can fidget with her hair when nervous, it can be wild when she’s worn out, and well-groomed when she’s in a good mood.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully these tips have helped you think about why physical description is important and ways to include it in your story. It’s certainly been helpful for me to think about why physical descriptions are important for my own writing. I hope you join us next week when we discuss one of my favorite topics, character voice. In the meantime, dress your characters up nicely and bee brilliant!
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