Beginners Guide; Writing Physical Descriptions of Your Character

In my previous article I had discussed a few tips on how to write a good character and what you would need to focus on in order to make your character stand out and capture the reader’s attention. Today, However, we will be looking at a different approach and explaining a few tips on how to quarterly describe your character’s physical appearance, something that most beginners struggle with.

The physical description cannot be overlooked, even if your story contains characters that are from the Animal Kingdom. Physical description helps in framing a picture in the imagination of the reader, this helps the reader connect to the character transforming the character from being just another shadow of words in a story to a real figure in a reader’s mind. Below are just a few ways of how to write a vivid physical description of your character.

Do Not List All the Features down.

When introducing this article, I did emphasize that a good physical description helps a reader to connect to the character. This is of course true but there needs to be a balance of how much you need information to give out. Let me Explain.

In romance novels for instance, most of the time the man or woman is described with general information but with added fluff,

For example the writer would write that their main character was 6’5 feet tall with blue eyes and will proceed to write that his jaw was like a Greek gods, his hair was the rusty blond that reminded the love interest of the bewitching color of the beach on a hot summers day and his chest made the love interests mouth water because it was deliciously toned and firm and would like to do sinful things to the body if the get the chance, they would also express that the shirt the main character was wearing was a grey color but hugged his huge arms yet was not small on him, it just hugged him in just the right places.

Now compared the rough explanation above and compare that with a writer who writes within their novel that the main character was a man with blue eyes as deep as the ocean, 6’5 had on a grey shirt that was the color of the rainy sky, he had a six pack that the love interest could see outline underneath his shirt, he had a mop hair with a bus cut his hair color was a sweet chocolate.

From the above you could see that both of the Physical description of the character actually work but the first one creates a fantasy an empty coloring book that makes you paint an image with what you imagine the character may look like.

These over exaggerated and exotic descriptions of a person’s feature make the reader imagine what they would look like and every reader will have a different image in their head.

The Characters Interests Are Part of the Character.

Everyone has a hobby or has something the like doing in their free time, I refuse to believe that there is a human out there on this beautiful planet we call earth that has no hobby or interesting thing they do. This also should be the case with your character. As a fictional Character there is no at first site impression awarded, there is only how much the reader can relate or understand.

Focus on bringing out the Characters hobby or even their occupation. For instance, if your main characters are a boxer, describing that his knuckles looked like they have been through something or if he is a Bike Racer you can clothe your character in a leather jacket, tattoos whatever cliché description you may switch in order to portray this.

Choose The Strongest and Revealing Features.

This ties in to my first Tip, in essence you do need to describe the character but leave some things to the reader’s imagination, not everyone has the same type in men or women, therefore choosing to focus on your characters strongest and revealing features will also create a sense of mystery to the reader.

 If your character’s main physical feature is his eyes have a really poetic or put together explanation of how they look like. You shouldn’t go through every physical feature up to the shape of the ear, it would make the character too unappealing if you describe them so bluntly and accurately.

Scattering Descriptions is The Key to Success.

What I mean is a good writer knows how to moderate the amount of information they are letting out in order to create an air of mystery and intrigued, a writers goal is to keep the audience or reader intrigued, to make them burn through the pages of the book in search of more information. To peak the reader’s curiosity to the point that they cannot put down the book and keep saying, just one more chapter.

Scattering your character’s physical description throughout the early stage of the book is a fantastic way of doing this. Writing a whole two pages or even one to three paragraphs of just explaining how the character looks like can be really boring and is a stain on your book.

By pacing the amount of information you give out about your character will really help you, for example you do not have to explain that the character has a tattoo all across his body if it is not needed.

Take for Example the female protagonist called Jane in a romance novel meets the main male protagonist, the first thing that captures her eyes should be described, if she was captivated by the man’s eyes, lips body and voice then describe that in detail. After a few pages when the characters meet again, she would have noticed something new, then write that. Pacing is everything, after all even you don’t notice everything on a person’s body on the first meeting, maybe they had a small mole that you did not notice before.

Practice Makes Perfect

And Finally the last and absolute tip that you can ever get is to practice. Simple as it sounds it is quite hard to commit to more so if you are constantly writing and rewriting a character’s description. Try and practice describing the people around you, your parents, your friends, grandparents or even strangers, better yet practice describing your crush I’m sure that would be exciting