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Joined: 3/16/2011
Posts: 279
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How detailed do you get describing your characters? Do you describe them right down to the wart on their toe, or do you keep things purposely vague? In skimming my favorite books I've noticed a lot of my favorite authors keep their descriptions vague, but a few stuck out with really detailed descriptions.
What do you prefer?
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 52
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I like to bring out the details of a character as I go along. But, I would say as far as my own writing, it has depended on if I'm writing something plot driven or character driven. If I want to focus on the plot, I tend to go with less is more for character description. If I want my characters to be front and center, then more. Although, I will admit that in one of my plot driven stories, a writer friend of mine told me I needed more character description. I felt kind of awkward doing it, but I tried to work it in. I think when I'm writing, it can sometimes distract me if I'm thinking too much about what everybody is wearing and if they have their hair combed. Other times, I find it fun to hang out with that character.
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Joined: 3/29/2011
Posts: 19
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In first drafts I tend to over-describe my characters, and on first revision, I'll cut out a ton of that initial info-dump. Instead I'll take little bits and pieces from that first draft and throw them about in the whole story, depending on where it makes sense.
I had a piece once that got ripped to shreds because I wasn't aware of that info-dump early on. For the next piece, I didn't put any description in at all, and got ripped to shreds for it not being there. I'm slowly finding my way to a happy middle ground.
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Joined: 3/13/2011
Posts: 51
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Hmm, I'm not sure how popular my approach to character description is going to be, given that people do tend to love going into great depth (and I love reading detailed descriptions), but I'm something of a minimalist. With other characters, I'll define their physical appearance and their background when it's relevant, and sometimes because I like to give the reader an idea of what this person is like before they begin engaging with them for 300 pages (best for characters that are, at first glance, somewhat dislikable).
For my protagonists, I take an entirely different approach. With Klaus, for example, I've not given his height, weight, hair colour - I'm even removing a significant amount of his backstory during my second-draft editing process. Some would argue it's a mistake, but in a novel written in the first person it seems bizarrely irrelevant, even with his introspective nature.
I suppose it's just a case of thinking about the perspective and voice of your work. If you're writing as an omniscient narrator (my thanks to another Bookcountrian for teaching me these terms recently), then you're going to be doing a lot of exposition work. But it's impossible to justify someone talking about the fact that their hair was brown in a context that doesn't involve a reflective surface.
I think Toni's approach really highlights the difficulties of balance within the writing process - do you focus on character, or narrative? Personally, I'd have to disagree slightly and say that the latter tends to define the former's relevancy within the pages of the book itself. I enjoy watching my characters hang out, too - it's amusing and you'll find that exposition is far easier through interaction and dialogue than someone monologuing about their dead grandmother for eight pages.
Like amberh, I recently tore out a huge chunk of exposition at the beginning of my novel. I loved those pages, but I had to admit that it was completely disruptive to the tone I used for the rest of the work. Some people still feel there's not quite enough explanation for certain events, or emotions, or reactions to events, so I agree - it certainly is a learning process.
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Joined: 5/8/2011
Posts: 52
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I prefer no description of PEOPLE personally, but since so many readers seem to want them, I put them in my own work 
I prefer short people-descriptions that focus on the main, hopefully unique, details of the character.
I don't like the following.
Marsha had long, straight brown hair and green eyes. She was 5'8" and 154 pounds. (etc).
Give me something more than the character's scorecard, and don't go on about their appearance too long, and I'm happy.
In first person, I prefer descriptions be conveyed obliquely if possible, or at least in a way other than self-description/looking in a mirror.
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Joined: 5/8/2011
Posts: 52
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Oh, other notes:
I don't want to find out on page 60 what color eyes a character I met on page 1 has. What if I've already imagined them with blue, now I'm being told they are brown? Give as much during or close-after intro to character as possible, and then leave the rest to my imagination. (that's my preference, not saying that is what actually must be done)
Things I do like it pointing out imperfection. I like to know things like that a character's "second toe" is slightly longer than her big toe, or that she has a small cluster of freckles under one eye but no where else on her body, or she has a scar on her knuckle from a planters wart she had when she was 12... that sorts of thing. IDK, maybe it's just me, I just find little details like that intriguing and it makes the characters feel real to me.
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Joined: 5/23/2011
Posts: 5
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I just do a very passing physical description. If they have anything especially weird about their appearance, I'll mention that. I prefer to let the character's actions, thoughts, and back story flesh him out in the reader's mind.
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Joined: 5/12/2011
Posts: 240
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I describe as a I go--or as my characters go, I guess--as lightly as possible. "She nodded and shoved a stray lock of dark hair behind her ear," is a good example. You know her hair is nondescriptly "dark" (fill in as you like) and long enough to both fall away from, but be shoved behind again, her ear. And maybe if it's just a lock, the rest of her hair is longer. But I didn't say "she had long, medium-brown hair."
Well, most of the time I don't. Sort of depends on who is looking. I often describe characters through the eyes of other characters too--in which case, what they notice will tell you not only about the person being described, but the person describing.
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Joined: 5/2/2011
Posts: 59
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Depends on if there is anything worth noting about them. For one character, the first time I describe some aspect of his appearance is when his arm gets cut off. Another character, however, is half-tree. He gets a couple of sentences of description because, really, there's no way to ease into that. My rule of thumb is basically the following: as a reader, I 'default' the appearances of my character to Caucasian, 5'2" to 6'2", 130 to 170 lbs, blonde, brown, or black hair, brown or blue eyes, average build, maybe Cs on a lady character. I only describe the elements of the character that differ from that description and cannot be implied otherwise (that is, if I say 'John is an elf', I won't bother telling you his ears are long and pointed, as I presume you presume that).
As a couple of examples, my character Vivian is a 'curvy' woman, so my narrator makes a quip about that. One character stumbles as he walks, one character is going through puberty over the course of the story (so her figure changes a bit), and one character has wings and scales. And, honestly, except for the supernatural bits - wings, scales, half-tree, etc. - I still don't state much directly. It's all just weaved into the prose. As an example, my protagonist has dark red hair (just barely breaking the norm) and long bangs and one character jokes that the only reason he doesn't react to the sight of blood is because of it. I never really state straight that he has long red hair, though.
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Joined: 5/12/2011
Posts: 240
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Alex reminds me of an interesting exercise Toni Morrison often discusses--that is making characters' race unmarked in writing. She did a short story called "Recitatif" in which two people speak and they are supposed to be white and Black and you can't say which is which. (This, after she had spent time thinking and writing and teaching about the ways in which white writers race-mark their non-white characters, with a presumption that "people" are white unless otherwise noted and that non-white people can be read as such in obvious ways.)
But she then did an entire novel--"Paradise"--which opens with the end of the story on the sentence "They shoot the white girl first."
You read the rest of the book as the characters are introduced one by one and you never know which of them is the white girl. Furthermore, presumably, many readers would not have thought that only one of the women in a large cast of characters was white. it's one of the unsettling things about the book for a U.S. American audience (at least) to not be able to put a finger on race identity of characters.
In my writing, I never presume anyone will be presumed any particular race. But I know readers DO presume, because we live in a white supremacist culture in which whiteness is a default as human identity goes. (We also live in patriarchy in which male is a default as far as human identity goes.)
I don't describe my characters by race, but I do describe various things about them that may or may not signal a particular racial identity. In a recent;y finished YA historical novel, I have a biracial character, but you don't know he's biracial until he tells the gruesome story of his father's lynching.
Thinking about this stuff as a writer is a whole new world from thinking about it as a reader. Terribly fascinating.
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Joined: 4/28/2011
Posts: 60
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I tend towards minimalism in my descriptions of characters, only including those details that are absolutely essential. This is because, as a reader, I prefer to be able to imagine my own version of the people in the stories and I get annoyed when the author intrudes on this. We tend to think of writing as a solitary pursuit, but it's really a collaborative dance with our readers. Reading requires an active engagement with the text and if I have everything spoon fed to me I feel cheated out of part of the experience I believe is essential to my enjoyment.
Now I'm going to go ahead and make a gross generalization here, but my completely unscientific impression is that contemporary female authors tend to describe the physical appearances of their characters much more than male authors. I certainly find that female authors subscribe much more to the "describe-her-wardrobe-down-to-the-pattern-on-her-undies" approach. That happens to be a personal pet peeve of mine and immediately pulls me out of my enjoyment of a book. Unless it's absolutely essential to the story or the character then I really don't care that she's wearing a sunflower yellow, raw-silk cardigan with pearl buttons and three-quarter sleeves.
That being said, when I do include even my minimal descriptions of characters, it's often from another character's point of view since, let's face it, we all judge people by how they look and that's the first thing we usually notice about someone when meeting them face-to-face.
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Joined: 3/16/2011
Posts: 279
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Good answers! Very informative seeing how everyone thinks about this.
I generally feed the general info of hair color/eye color and build in subtly like...
Miss Fungus Head brushed her green hair out of her eyes impatiently, "What is this spore?"
I like to keep some things with the main characters vague enough so the reader can build a mental image of their own.
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Joined: 3/16/2011
Posts: 214
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For me, it largely depends on the genre. For romance, I’m less inclined to get very detailed about the heroine, and this is for a reason. I want female readers to have somewhat of a blank slate, so they can imagine themselves as she is. Sabrina in “See Sabrina Run” is the spitting image of Edie Sedgwick in my mind, BTW – but only I need that information. The only thing I did want to make clear was that she and the MMC are very disparate in height and build – a “Midge and Moose” couple. She’s short and tiny, and he has the height and build of a light heavyweight boxer. This too, was intentional; I wanted to use this as a metaphor of how two very different people who don’t even look like they belong together can essentially share the same qualities and relate to one another.
One thing that turns me off in romance is a blond MMC with light blue, green or grey eyes. I don’t find pale-haired men remotely attractive. Blond hair, brown eyes … maybe, but even that’s a push. Seriously, I will go out of my way to avoid the blond hero. Just personal preference.
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Joined: 5/8/2011
Posts: 52
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I also don't find blond haired men attractive, so when they are described as attractive in a book, it's definitely not for me. Though I understand everyone has their own tastes, I wouldn't want to write a blone male character as a lead either.
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Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 376
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@Lisa - I actually did that in the first draft of XLI with Tram, for exactly the same reason. I hit one major problem...
I described everyone else in *relation* to him. Taller than him, shorter than him, heavier, lighter, so on and so on. SO... eventually I had to add in the lines where he gives his height and weight. Sadly, he's sandy blonde and green eyed. Fortunately, it's not a romance, exactly.
I'm curious - do you guys really see a lot of blonde heroes? I... I cant' recall the last time I saw a blonde hero. They're all 'dark and mysterious', and it's the blonde *women* who are described as 'beautiful'. As a blonde guy who married a brunette, it makes getting anniversary cards with pictures on just a touch difficult. At last count I've seen one in two decades. 
Regarding the physical disparity, I've done something similar in What Not to Fear (Hitting the shelves soon! Yay!) I actually based some of the humor on that exact disparity.
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Joined: 5/12/2011
Posts: 240
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I don't know, Robert. I think knowing someone's description in relation to others around him is enough. That's what we're really after when we imagine characters, isn't it? If they are "tall dark and handsome" not if they are 6'4", brown-eyed, with chiseled features.
I tend to tell people that my girl heroes are tall by having my girl heroines look up at them, for instance.
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Joined: 7/24/2013
Posts: 3
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The story line usually says how detailed any of my characters will be. I tend to give basic details and allow the reader to fill the nuisances. This allows them to personalize them rather than me painting an unchangeable picture of them. I don't read a lot of mystery because the authors need to fill so many pages with descriptions as word fill and leave nothing for the reader to make their own. However, sometimes there is a need to do so, either to emphasize some fault or notable difference between a normal one and someone not so normal. Examples: Exceedingly bushy eyebrows. Hair like it just came out of a waffle iron. Beady, close set eyes. Eyes that look like black pools with a blue ring around them.
Well, to each his or her own. If you like it then only the reader will be your judge.
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Joined: 7/31/2013
Posts: 8
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I would imagine, as I do, most Authors picture their characters in their minds as they are writing, so it is important to share your character's appearance with your readers through simple but descriptive text. Descriptive text sets the scene, describing the landscape, the weather or physical appearance etc but must be short and straight to the point, as readers get the picture fairly quickly, so for me, long drawn out descriptions tend to become boring. How often have you picked up a book and skipped through the jargon to get to the guts of the story? Once the reader has established the character David is tall dark and handsome, or short fat and ugly, as the case may be, his arrogance or lack of confidence, portrays his personality through dialogue the moment he opens his mouth.
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In the end it's really quite simple. You describe as much as your protagonist notices and reacts to. If, for example, the protagonist of a given scene is male and he meets a woman, what he notices depends a great deal on what he feels important in the moment, so we describe what he notices in the order he notices and reacts to it. That's modified by the kind of person he is ( clothing designer as against a steel rigger, for example) and his goal in the scene. If she's young and attractive, and he feels she might be available he would notice and react to different aspects of her than were she a nurse carrying an enema bag bound for his body.
A woman who meets that same character in the same situation would react differently. And since we're nominally in the protagonist's point of view, if we, as the author, talk about things we feel important as against what the protagonist is noticing and reacting to, isn't that a break of POV?
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Joined: 2/9/2012
Posts: 427
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I like this explanation, Jay. Good stuff.
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