Describing characters seems really easy until you actually try to do it well. On the one hand, we can put the entire description (three paragraphs, each slightly under a page long) at the front, which would get everything on the page, but a moment’s thought assures us that nobody would read that. We wouldn’t read that, will probably skip over it when time comes to re-draft that segment. So we can’t do that. On the other hand, we need some description; how are people supposed to picture a character without any clue as to how he looks? I know because I wrote that character description out in painstaking detail, and because I’ve skimmed it twice to make sure it sticks, but the reader doesn’t know. The answer, it seems, must be somewhere in the middle, but it’s hard to figure out precisely where. We need some basic principles and guides in the process.¹

What is ‘Character Description’?

To quickly define the term we’ll be using: Character description is the sensory aspect of the character, how he looks, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds, as well as however he appears to whatever more esoteric senses are applied to him. Backstory is not properly part of it but often falls inside its category in practicality, blurring the line with characterization (who he is on the inside) and plot.

Who, Not What

The first principle to establish is what my priority needs to be in describing the character, particularly the first time through. The appearance of the character, odd as this might sound, isn’t really what I should be aiming to convey. The what of the character’s appearance is secondary, a tool. No, what I’m working to convey is who the character is. The details are a mechanism for this, a vehicle, not the desired result.

Consider this passage from C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (which you absolutely should read):

“On a sofa before her, with one foot bandaged as if he had a wound, lay what appeared to be a boy, twenty years old…. But all the light in the room seemed to run towards the gold hair and the gold beard of the wounded man. Of course he was not a boy–how could she have thought so? The fresh skin on his forehead and cheeks and, above all, on his hands, had suggested the idea. But no boy could have so full a beard. And no boy could be so strong. She had expected to see an invalid. Now it was manifest that the grip of those hands would be inescapable, and imagination suggested that those arms and shoulders could support the whole house. Miss Ironwood at her side struck her as a little old woman, shrivelled and pale –a thing you could have blown away.”

Chapter 7, The Pendragon

This description contains, we see immediately, several points of informational detail. His apparent age is communicated, his skin and hair are touched on, and his foot is bandaged. All these are physical details, aspects of his literal appearance, but they are scarcely a fraction of the paragraph, are manifestly servants of another purpose. In this passage, Lewis does not seek to capture a photograph of the Director, for all it is his first physical appearance. No, Lewis here creates an understanding of how his character appears to Jane; he communicates not a photograph but the beginning of a character. Note how he does not say, ‘His arms had the muscular capacity to lift up the house.’ That’s not what he’s aiming for at all. He’s communicating the Director’s presence, the impression of his existence in the world.

This shift in priority is the first and most central part of character description which we must grasp. The goal of our description is not truly to transfer a photograph of the character into the reader’s mind. In all likelihood, every reader will perceive the character differently, give him a little different physiognomy, understand ‘chestnut brown hair’ uniquely, image different hands upon a different sword. This is not failure, else every author in history is a failure. No, what the description seeks to do is to communicate the character’s presence, his self, to the reader. Only after this does the secondary purpose of description, to facilitate interplay between the character and his surroundings in the reader’s mind, come into play.

Essential v Nonessential Details

If you’ve studied English grammar, you’ve come across the concept of essential and non-essential clauses. One needs a comma; the other doesn’t. For me, at least, the distinction was difficult to understand. So many times a clause seemed essential to the meaning of the sentence, would change so much if it was removed, but the grammar book said to set it off with commas. Even nowadays, to be honest, I operate more by instinct than technicality, though I can compass the technicalities. Delineating between essential and non-essential details in a character description has a similar problem, sometimes.

What detail is truly important? What detail isn’t? When is a detail worthwhile without being essential? See, just as a clause’s non-essential status doesn’t mean you need to eliminate it, a detail’s lack of necessity doesn’t mean it has to go. We need a test. Further, before we set that out, let’s establish our ending categories: essential, integral (a sub-category worth distinguishing), worthwhile (but not essential), and frivolous.

When you’re dealing with description, of characters and everything else, it’s often a good idea to ask yourself what happens if the reader misses or misunderstands this detail. Lets take my story ‘Why Ought I to Die?’ as our example, starting with the protagonist Penny’s hair color. Now, to be quite honest, I don’t quite remember what his hair color was or whether I mentioned it. It was brown, if I had to guess, but this detail is obviously non-essential. No plot point turns on it. Penny is intentionally not exceptionally handsome or ugly (at least to start with), a description implied by a lack of description. His specific hair color is irrelevant to the story, to plot, character, theme, and setting all. At most a sense of unimportance should attach to it. This is a frivolous detail, as I’m classifying it.

Frivolous details are the ones that don’t hurt the story (we already know to leave those out) but aren’t actually significant at all. They might give slightly better understanding of the world, might help fill the periphery of some scene, but they’re there as much for pacing as anything else. The next step up is ‘worthwhile’ details. As the name suggests, these details do have a purpose and a place. They don’t in themselves decide plot points or affect character, but they point at things that do. The color of Penny’s eyes at the end of the first chapter does not by itself change much in the story, but it is a part of something that is absolutely essential, part of the reader understanding that, part of Penny’s reaction to it. The detail could be swapped for any other that fit the same role,² in theory, but the role is essential.

Worthwhile details are often incredibly important. These elements of the story may be dispensable individually, but as a whole they do much of the work of the story, creating a world, establishing characters, communicating the plot.

Essential details (and integral ones) are the ones that make you wince when you think of the reader missing them. If the reader misses such a detail, something breaks- the world, the characters, the plot, the theme. Perhaps it doesn’t break that badly, but it breaks nonetheless. In The Lord of the Rings, the inscription on the Ring is an essential detail, without which the story loses something significant. Some details in this category I would place in a sub-category: integral. By this I mean details which, while they might not immediately break something if removed, are absolutely necessary to the story. The height of the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings could be removed without quite breaking many plot points, but so much of the story would be immediately lesser for the loss of the detail.

Often, the best guide to precisely how important a detail is isn’t some equation of importance but your instinct on the matter. We must be careful, however. Sometimes a detail is important to us which isn’t at all important to the reader. I may be thoroughly acquainted with the precise style of sword Penny wields (at least visually)³, but the reader doesn’t necessarily need to know all the details there. I may be excited by the miscellaneous knowledge I have of Tegaderan⁴ religious processes, but most of that isn’t actually relevant to the story that bit of worldbuilding came about in the context of. The color of Penny’s hair wasn’t particularly exciting to me either, to be honest, but if it had been, I would have had to reign in my excitement and remember its relative unimportance. In such situations, we must learn to reign in our excitement, hone our judgement, and make use of other eyes to look at the issue- whether from another person or by waiting a while to let our emotional attachment cool down.⁵

We must remember, too, that sometimes a detail’s importance doesn’t quite fit into a neat category. In Come, Drink of His Cup, the unnamed gunman wears black-and-silver only, except for a single bit of color: a dark red poncho. The color of his clothing and the color of that poncho are important not just to set the idea of his character but in a symbolic sense. That the only color on him is the color of wine and of blood- I make the first comparison directly- is symbolically very important. Would it kill the story to remove? Not quite, but it would definitely hurt it. Remember, the categories are only a way of getting your brain on-topic and running; what’s important is that you recognize a detail’s importance or lack thereof.

Conclusion (For Now)

My outline has a number of other principles to consider when it comes to character description (and description in general, honestly), so this is definitely a Part One of I-don’t-know-how-many. For now, though, we’ve hit two absolutely essential parts of description: first, the character is more important than their appearance, and second, learn to prioritize. These lessons cross disciplines too; it’s not only in describing characters or in description in general that they matter. When communicating plot, for instance, it’d be easy to focus so much on something-that-happens that the reader loses all interest in it or loses understanding of how it connects to the wider story. The lesson in general is to make sure you know what you’re aiming for and check where your shots are landing. Like many parts of writing, it’s easily said, a lifetime to do, but well worth it all the same.

God bless.

Read Part Two Here!

Footnotes

1 – I keep starting these things and realizing too late that they are larger than a single post. Example par excellence: my series about knives.

2 – It’s actually part of a suite of details fulfilling this role.

3 – But if you want to know: here.

4 – This references a story I am currently in the process of drafting. A long story, with a lot of worldbuilding that’s never making it into the final product.

5 – Attachment to that detail, to be specific. I’m not advocating for intentionally making yourself unenthusiastic about the story as a whole; that kills stories both practically and artistically.