Character Descriptions Do More than You Think They Do
Controlling what kinds of details you give, and how much.
Last year, I was in an online writing group. I submitted a few chapters from a novel draft I had started for practice. It was a high school drama that followed two friends from impoverished backgrounds going to a school in a rich neighborhood. In the chapter I submitted, the reader was introduced to one of the main character’s home and family for the first time.
I don’t always remember the criticism my work gets (okay who am I kidding I agonize over that stuff until I lose sleep over it). Still, the specific criticism I got for this chapter stands out more than most of the other feedback I get for my writing.
Your main character sounds like a teenaged girl.
Of course, the character in question was a teenaged boy. An obnoxiously straight and rather horny teenaged boy if I might add. It wasn’t that I had failed to do what I wanted, but I had accidentally succeeded in doing the wrong thing. These kinds of mistakes present the greatest opportunity for improvement, in my opinion, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
The answer was in my character descriptions
The writing group informed me that I had more-or-less gotten the point I wanted to make with this character across through other means: namely dialogue and setting. However, the chapter in question had a paragraph or two where I stop to describe the character’s older brother.
The character I was writing was overweight and unattractive. It was important to me that the reader understand this because it played into his massive crush on the rich, attractive, popular girl in his math class. By contrast, I wanted to make his brother fit, handsome, and put together. My first instinct was to emphasize his physical appearance to emphasize the contrast.
A note on narrative distance
The project I was working on was in third person. Still, not all third person narratives are created equally.
The concept of narrative distance refers to how “close” the narrator is to the thoughts, feelings, and biases of the character they’re narrating. The closer the narrative distance, the more third person narration begins to resemble first person.
If your narrator, for example, is able to tell us about a character’s insecurity about her height before she realizes it for herself, chances are that narrator is far from the character. Likewise, if your narrator almost takes on the tone of the character it follows, and cannot tell the reader anything about what the character feels or thinks beyond what that characters knows in the moment, that narrator is close to the reader.
Using narrative distance and character description together
In my case, my narrator was very, very close to my characters. I like writing this way, or simply in first person, because I love reading stories where I live with the characters, and I want to create the same experience for my readers.
In a general sense, I was aware that the line between narration and the character’s thoughts blurred the closer I pulled the narrator to the character, but I hadn’t yet fully had a grasp on the ramifications of doing so.
If I wrote that chapter in first person, I would have of course realized that it’d be silly for a character to stop and admire at how attractive his brother is. But with a close narrative distance, it’s not much different to have the narrator do the same thing.
It’s a powerful (and embarrassing) observation that’s obvious after the fact. I learned my lesson and cooled it with the vaguely incestuous undertones for that chapter and forever hopefully. But that day, I also realized that I could use this principle purposefully to write character descriptions that also double as character building for the one doing the describing.
This will be clearer with an example. Take these two scenes I wrote with a narrator close to our main character Alice:
Alice took a glance up from her four monitors and eighteen spreadsheets to acknowledge Mark standing over her desk. His navy blue suit didn’t fit him at all, somehow looking both a size too large at the sleeves and a size too small around the waist. He wore a teal tie etched with a blinding pattern of squares and zigzags that he had already managed to stain with mustard, even though lunch wasn’t for another hour. His face was in desperate need of a shave. Did that smirk of his ever leave his face? These days it felt like the company would hire just about anyone. She sighed.
Alice took a glance up from her four monitors and eighteen spreadsheets to acknowledge Mark standing over her desk. Mark was tall and broad-shouldered, with a permanent smile that came with the confidence of being the newest hire on the job. His tousled dirty-blond hair and dark stubble made him feel like the friendliest guy in the room, but he was trying too hard with his suit. It made him so stiff and awkward. Alice wondered what Mark would look like in something more his style: rubber sandals, capri pants, and a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned at his chest. She sighed.
The situation is the same: Mark greets Alice over her desk at work. He’s wearing this navy blue suit that doesn’t fit and he’s got a dumb smile on his face. Alice is also not the narrator in either scene.
The first Alice seems to hyperfocus on how unprofessional Mark looks. There’s no mention of Mark’s height or body, not because Mark is shorter or more slender in one scene or another, but because these are details this Alice wouldn’t pick up on, seeing as she’d much rather list the ways his existence pisses her off.
Likewise, the second Alice doesn’t notice the stain on Mark’s tie. It’s not because it’s not there in that scene, but, rather, Alice’s crush on Mark makes her overlook it. Second Alice instead considers what first Alex thought of as flaws as reasons to like him, and as a jumping-off point to fantasize about him even more.
In short, what the narrator focuses on with regards to Mark’s character description tells us a lot about Alice’s feelings for Mark without having to flat out say “Alice has a huge crush on him” or “Alice thinks he’s a smug, incompetent jerk”.
Another example
I want to show that this principle works even if we increase the narrative distance. Consider two more scenes that follow six friends who met in high school, seeing each other again at a reunion summer barbecue.
Joe arrived at the barbecue, the collar of his shirt damp from sweat. Petey, Georgina, Carole, and Bart were already setting up, the two dogs rolling in the grass with the kids. Bart sat in the dirt, blue in the face blowing up a beach ball, while Petey and Georgina were setting up the picnic area for the others.
Carole looked up from the steak cooking on the grill and noticed Joe’s car. It wasn’t him that made her heart grind to a stop, it was his wife, Ruby, who with small hands took a stack of packs of beers out of Joe’s trunk and waddled to her husband’s side. Ruby wore her signature turtle neck sweater, even while the afternoon sun pushed the temperature past 90°F. Carole blushed, wondering if Ruby even remembered her.
Joe arrived at the barbecue, the collar of his shirt damp from sweat. He didn’t understand how his wife could wear that woolly sweater of hers even on a day like that one. I only brought to show her off, he thought, What an embarrassment. As he thought, his wife Ruby took one too many packs of beers from the back of his car than her poor frame could handle. Every step she took brought her closer to falling over. The beers clanged together as the stack tilted and swayed.
Carole watched Ruby over the grill, her heart grinding to a halt as old passions and grudges boiled back up in her chest. Petey smelled the steak burning over the hot coals but didn’t bother to tell her. He was too exhausted from moving a dozen folding chairs in the heat. The sticky orange air smothered Georgina in oppressive heat as she straightened out the picnic blanket and wondered if the itch on the back of her neck was a thirteenth mosquito bite or a poison ivy rash. Bart was nearly losing consciousness from unsuccessfully inflating the volleyball one of the dogs had punctured an hour earlier, unbeknownst to him.
The kids cried for food, cried for water, cried for games, cried against the heat, and cried for crying’s sake. And everyone, everyone cried to God for relief.
The two excerpts again describe the same scene, this time with a narrator a bit more free to give the full picture of the scene instead of one character’s point of view.
The first sounds like the beginning of a casual meetup between old friends where anything can happen. We’re given a hint some kind of past between Carole and Ruby that has yet to be truly resolved, but it’s more interesting than expressly negative.
The second has all these extra details about how uncomfortable and upset everyone is. Ruby is no longer holding too many beers, but about to hurt herself. Carole is described with more anxiety than nostalgia. We’re now told some of the food is burning, and there are mosquitoes, and heat is not fun to stand around in. Overall, the added detail paints a picture of a barbecue picnic about to go horribly wrong in every way imaginable. We wouldn’t be surprised if these characters ended the afternoon about to kill each other, figuratively or otherwise.
Conclusion
Even if the narrator doesn’t speak for a specific character directly, the narrator always speaks on behalf of how the reader ought to feel, and keeping that in mind is the key to making the most out of character description in fiction.
It’s easy for writers to go on autopilot when we need to introduce and describe a character. They’re usually not the most interesting to write or read, and plenty of successful authors advocate not bothering with them at all.
Still, in many situations, character descriptions are a gem hidden in plain sight, waiting to elevate the character, plot, tone, and charm of your writing.
