What work does description do?
"How can I make my physical descriptions come alive more?"
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is a reader-supported newsletter providing advice and support for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. If you know someone this applies to, you can forward them this email and encourage them to sign up. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response.
NEWS ALERT! My short story “Care and Feeding” was published in The Rumpus last week — I hope you’ll check it out!
I started writing this story in 2017, and while I was obviously writing other things over that time, that still means it was seven years from first words to publication, and a LOT of drafts and revision. Even once it was accepted, my editor Christopher Santantasio and I went through multiple rounds to nail down the structure and make sure every word earned its keep. It was an incredible pleasure to give this kind of attention to a story I care about so deeply, and a reminder of how much of writing is rewriting, rethinking, and keeping an open mind. I’m really glad I didn’t rush it!
Please note that this story discusses law enforcement, mental health, and violence, and has a mention of pregnancy. It’s about caring for ourselves and for others, so please take care of yourself when reading. <3
Dear Kate,
I’ve noticed I almost never write very much physical description for my characters. I guess I don’t see them in my mind that way. I know I’m missing something here that I need to put in, but when I go to describe someone it sounds forced and awkward to run off a list of attributes. Does it really matter what the character’s eye color is or how tall they are? Can I leave that stuff out? If not, how can I make my descriptions come alive more and incorporate them into my writing (fiction)?
- Brown Hair, Don’t Care
Dear Brown Hair, Don’t Care,
I’m with you. A lot of the time physical description doesn’t matter in a piece of writing and only serves to slow the story down by providing an unnecessary pause to point out that Sally has brown hair or Jonny has a mustache. Who cares! The worst thing in a story is to have the answer be, “No one.”
But that doesn’t mean the culprit is the description itself! The problem is description that isn’t doing anything. If the reader doesn’t care about an aspect of a story, whether that’s physical description, setting, a plot point, etc., it’s sometimes a sign that you don’t need that particular element taking up space on the page and can freely delete it. But it can also be a sign that you, dear author, haven’t done the work you need to do to make that element relevant.
The key to physical description (or any description, like setting) is to understand what it’s there for. It’s one of the tools at your disposal to create a vivid, multidimensional world populated by vivid, multidimensional characters. This depth comes when the description gives the reader more than just a surface image of a character. Description is strongest when it reveals something about a person beyond the physical and creates a deeper sense of who they are. The work here can be subtle, but every subtle layer works together to build up the meaning and significance of your writing over time.
There’s almost never any need to hit pause in your narrative to tell the reader that Sally has brown hair, brown eyes, and is 5’8”. That information doesn’t do anything to serve the story, and it slows everything down. *yawn*
But what if Sally’s long hair is always getting tangled, and the new star volleyball player has three inches on her? These aren’t earth-shattering examples, but suddenly that information about Sally’s height and hair is doing something to create a sense of character. These details contribute to Sally’s characterization, showing us someone who sees herself as disorganized, maybe, and not quite fitting in. “The man had a silver moustache” tells us a little bit about his age and style, but that he keeps his moustache neatly trimmed and his pants neatly pressed tells us even more. He’s short but strides quickly, with authority. Is he the type of person to wear sneakers, or to polish his dress shoes? You don’t have to answer all these questions for your characters — it would be weird to describe every character’s footwear all the time. But every choice you’re making shows something about a person. Your job as the writer isn’t to show us every detail, but to pick the details that matter and make them matter.
Let’s take eye color. Just saying a character has brown eyes, for example, doesn’t feel inherently relevant or interesting on its own. But what if someone’s icy blue eyes are shooting daggers, or their milky gray eyes can’t quite focus as they recount a distant memory, or their brown eyes flicker deeply in the candlelight? These are lousy examples, but leaning into the obvious can be illustrative: now you have a physical description (eye color) that’s also showing something about character (anger, confusion, lust, etc.).
This still doesn’t mean you have to include anything about someone’s eyes! There’s no checklist you have to run through in order to get an A in “Describing Character.” The point is that the physical description doesn’t stand on its own. It’s a concrete detail that does more than simply describe what the reader “sees” in their mind’s eye. Once you know why a detail should be included, it won’t feel irrelevant anymore.
To use my own work as an example: In the novel I have coming out next year, Greenwich, the protagonist, Rachel, is self-conscious that she’s taller than her peers, and she hates the blunt haircut she got right before graduating from high school. She feels plain, ordinary, and invisible, especially compared to her fashionable aunt and the new friend she latches onto for the summer she spends in Connecticut. I don’t run through a litany of attributes to describe Rachel, though. We don’t ever need to see her standing in front of the mirror narrating: “I have brown eyes and freckles and a small chin and my ears stick out.” (Or whatever… I’ve never thought about her ears before.) But she describes her aunt’s blowout and thin, cool fingers slick with moisturizer. She notices her own cut-off shorts in relation to other women’s sundresses and their smooth, shaved legs. Rachel’s self-perception doesn’t only create a physical picture in the reader’s mind that makes her feel more dimensional and “real” on the page. It also adds important commentary about markers of class, whiteness, femininity, and heterosexuality that the book is ultimately concerned with. It’s too much to say that Rachel hurts her new friend later in the book because she’s tall and hates her haircut, lol, but all the details about how she sees herself are part of the building blocks, both small and large, that create a clear picture of an insecure teenager who doesn’t know who she is and can’t stand up to others. Physical details about Rachel aren’t just hanging out on their own because it’s what a book is “supposed” to include. They’re woven into the larger narrative in order to purposefully drive the story forward and create meaningful narrative consequences.
In the story “Care and Feeding,” to take another example since I have it at my fingertips: I don’t give very much physical description of the characters at all. In the very first sentence we get Officer Jim Conway touching his new badge, which shows us something about his eagerness and insecurity—but we don’t know how tall he is or what his hair looks like or how broad his shoulders are. Those aren’t details that matter to the story, so I didn’t clutter the page with them. And yet I still think there’s a sense of place, character, and physicality to the scenes — we know these are embodied characters who move and act and feel things.
Later on, I think this might be the only physical description of the father in the story, in the moment he sees something unspeakable and his world is shattered:
The man—the father—was very quiet. The silence was itself a noise. He was not rushing anymore; he stood there and stood there, a hot flush creeping up his neck to the unshaven scrape of his chin.
Again, it doesn’t matter how tall this man is or whether he’s balding or graying or what kind of shirt he’s wearing. In this moment, he’s having a physical reaction that speaks volumes about what he’s feeling. In the context of the story, we suspect he hasn’t shaved because he’s been too worried about his son to bother. “Unshaven” isn’t the most important word in the story — you could easily gloss right over it without losing any meaning. But if a reader does stop to think about it, they’ll know that word was chosen intentionally, to show something about this man’s character and his current state of mind. There’s no room in a story — or a novel — for extraneous details! Every word you choose gets to do this kind of double-work, painting a physical world and showing something harder to pin down.
No descriptions are neutral, and neither is the person doing the describing. As you make choices about what to describe, pay close attention to who is conveying these details and what they are (or aren’t) noticing. Even if you have an omniscient narrator, they can’t recount every single aspect of a person’s clothes, or body—there have to be choices or your book would literally never end (or never get started, it would just be endless description). So what choices does the narrator make, and why? If you have a first person or a close third person narrator, what is that character noticing about themselves and others? Again, why does it matter? In Greenwich, Rachel fixates on particular aspects of what she deems beautiful and desirable (or undesirable) in herself and in others. Every one of her observations is loaded with her own biases and spin! Physical description is really just a sneaky way of incorporating more character work, and character work is a way of furthering plot by advancing the who-is-doing-what components of your story.
It’s easy (and boring) (and cruel) to fall into stereotypes when it comes to description: to assume the redhead has a fiery personality, or the bouncy curls make a character carefree — to say nothing of negative biases based on bodies and other attributes. Don’t do that!!! Check your assumptions as you’re writing, and make sure you’re creating vivid, multidimensional characters — not flattened caricatures. Physical attributes aren’t a substitute for meaningful character development, and a little bit of visual description often goes a long way.
The best resource, as always, is to see how other authors have tackled this problem. Read books in your genre, as well as books outside your genre, and take note of the different forms of description you see and how they’re integrated into the story. Where do you encounter straight-up physical description? Where is the physical description showing something else about the character? When in the narrative do these details occur? What’s not being said, and why do you think it was left out? What’s the overall visual picture you get about a character, what more about the character does this picture create for you, and can you reverse-engineer how the author accomplished this successfully?
You can also practice with different approaches in your own writing. Save your work to a separate document and start to play with it. What happens if you write something more visual and description-oriented? Or what happens if you cut your physical descriptions—how does it change your understanding of the story? Can you take a line of description and work it into the narrative in a different way? You won’t necessarily stumble across THE SECRET ANSWER TO ALL OF WRITING.1 But you might uncover something interesting that you can use along the way. :)
Keep writing!
Kate
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