How much description will your readers need when your character first appears on the page? Should you give a quick sentence about how your character looks, or a detailed run-down?
What if your story is written in the first person? You don't want to resort to having your character stare into a mirror, but how else can you write a physical description?
All of these questions can really trip up novelists! As with so many things in writing, there's rarely a "right" answer: different levels of description will work for different genres.
One option – and I can definitely see the appeal of this, because I don't particularly like writing descriptions! – is to say very little about how your character looks at all, particularly if they're the main character. The theory here is that readers will "fill in the blanks" and imagine a character who looks how they want them to look.
Sometimes, though, how your character looks is important: it tells us more about who they are, it might be relevant to their character arc, and it could have an impact (even if a small one) on the plot.
In those cases, it makes sense to give us at least some physical descriptions. I'd suggest focusing on what's significant and/or unusual. For instance, you might think about:
- How does this character's appearance differ from what might be expected of them, in their culture or society? If they're a man in the UK, for instance, long hair would be fairly unusual and might indicate something about the character. (I'm a big fan of long hair on men, by the way!) If they're a woman in most Western countries, wearing a skirt with unshaven legs would be unusual. If you're
writing a novel set in the 1950s, a woman wearing trousers would be unusual.
- How does the character's appearance reflect who they are? If you have someone who dresses in ill-fitting drab clothes, that might tie in with their depression, poverty, or just a lack of interest in fashion and in what other people think.
- How does the character's appearance impact on the plot? Perhaps you're writing a crime novel, and your main character has a particular characteristic (which could be something fairly mundane and ordinary, like "shoulder-length brown hair") that fits the profile of victims being murdered by a serial killer.
If there's nothing unusual, revealing, or significant about a character's appearance ... I'd question whether you need to describe how they look at all!
Most readers don't want or expect detailed descriptions of exactly how a character looks (the main exception here is probably readers of romance novels, who may well want you to describe your hunky hero in lavish detail). A sentence or two is often enough, and you could always describe a character briefly when they first make an appearance then show the reader more about them through another character's eyes
later on.
With a first-person narrator, you might want to focus on aspects of their appearance that cause them difficulties in some way (e.g. perhaps your character has blue and pink hair, and she's just been turned down for a job because of it). Avoid giving us a shopping-list style description where you describe them from the head down.
