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Writing character appearance can be really tricky. How much do you show us? What’s important to discuss, and what can we leave out? What does your reader really care about? We’re going to answer these questions using my five point framework so you can really dive into my thought process behind writing character appearance.

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What we should really be doing when writing character appearance

Character appearance, as it sounds, is showing the reader what your character looks like. Easy, right? Well, there’s some nuance that comes with writing good character descriptions. 

When we talk about character appearance, we should also be talking about what the reader needs, what they don’t, and how this character description matters to the story. 

As you’ll see, character appearance is really just a vague sketch of a character. We won’t be giving our readers every detail as to what our character looks like, because one, that’s really overwhelming and cumbersome to read; and two, it’s a waste of words on the page. We want to be using every word on the page intentionally, especially if you’re writing short stories.

What’s important about writing character appearance?

Writing character appearance is important, but probably not as important as you might think. For instance, whether your character has blue eyes or brown eyes isn’t going to change the plot of your story, it’s not going to change your character’s motives or personality. 

But things like skin color, weight, disability, or gender impact the way your character moves through a world. These things unfortunately lead to oppression and othering. So, something like the skin color of your character is going to change your character’s motives and point of view. The way the world sees a White man is much different than how the world sees a Black woman.

Sprinkle descriptions into the action of your story

Have you ever read a story where the author has laid out that the character has curly brown hair, blue eyes, stunning freckles, rosy cheeks, full lips, a slim frame, and small feet? They just go off in a paragraph about how stunning their character is and they give you every detail for you to put together like a puzzle in your mind. The momentum of the story has stopped, or not even started yet, and we’re stuck at this speed bump of exposition. We have to pump the brakes and wade through all of this self-gratifying description. That’s pretty annoying, and my guess is your eyes start to skim and move on to where the story picks up.

To avoid your readers’ eyes glazing over, it’s better to sprinkle in some description with the action of your story. If your character has to get dressed, you can show us something of their physical appearance while they’re focusing on it. If your character does her makeup, maybe we see what color her eyes are there.

While your character is walking through a forest, do they ever have to duck under tree branches? That would tell us how tall they are. There are really slick ways to weave physical description in with what’s actually happening in your story.

Less is more

This might be a controversial opinion, but I really like to trim down my character descriptions to the bare bones. I only give my readers what they need to know. Sometimes, my character descriptions are as basic as “adult woman”. Okay, not blatantly stated like that, more through subtext.

From the absolute first mention of a character, your reader already has an idea of what this person looks like. You use the word “she” and no other descriptors, your reader already has a picture of a woman in their head. So the more you describe, the more mental-gymnastics the reader has to do to put your pieces together. When we read a story, we want to zone in and just focus on the story, the last thing we want is to be taken out of the story to have to stop and rethink what a character looks like.

So, if you’re going to give specific details in your character descriptions, it’s better to do it earlier in the story, and only pick the ones that really matter.

It’s great that you as an author know these things, because they could potentially dictate how this character physically moves through the story, but you have to decide what is important for your reader to know. If her signature feature is the blue eyes because she lives in a world where everybody else has brown eyes, then we need to know that.

Writing character appearance with a first-person narrator

If you’re writing a story in first person, then the way we see the world is filtered through how your main character sees things. So any time you describe characters, we’re seeing them as your main character sees them.

If your main character is a really detail-oriented person, you might write those more detailed descriptions of characters. Maybe the narrator sees someone pick up a pencil and notices the button on their sleeve is undone. Or they notice a scar on his hand.

But, if your character is a bit more oblivious, they wouldn’t see those details, so you wouldn’t include them. We’d get a much more basic description of a character, maybe just sticking to height and hair color.

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Your 1st-person-POV character describing themself

The way your main character describes themself is really important, too. Again, depending on how detail-oriented your character is, we’ll see more or less of those finer points. But remember that we don’t really think about our physical appearance so specifically. I don’t look in the mirror and think “my blue eyes look so big today”. I might think “oh my eye looks kind of red and feels dry” because that’s something unusual. But I’ve lived 25 years with blue eyes, so I’m used to that and I’m not going to point that out to myself every morning.

Instead, I might point out to myself how a certain pair of pants makes me look, or what a new hairstyle feels like.

To describe your main character, you might use other characters’ dialogue to do so. Maybe someone says to your main character “You’re blushing!” after something embarrassing happens. Or someone might compliment her freckles or her big brown eyes.

Writing character appearance with a third-person narrator

If you write your story in third person, you’re not describing things from a character’s point of view, but you are still filtering this story through a lens. Your narrator has a personality and an objective, even if it isn’t known to the reader. The style and voice that you write your narration in is important. It needs to stay consistent throughout your story, no matter what point of view you’re using. 

That being said, you can choose to use whichever style of character descriptions you’d like to. It just needs to stay consistent. So, if your narrator really hones in on the appearance of one of your characters, you need to bring that same energy to the other characters. Or you need to have a really good reason as to why you don’t.

Writing character appearance with their personality in mind

I believe this is the most seamless way to weave in character appearance. But, how do you do this? 

Say you want to show us that your character has really long hair. Maybe you write that her long hair sways behind her as walks. This not only shows the hair, but it implies that she has a pep in her step. To get your hair to sway behind you, you have to walk quickly or with a bounce. It shows more to the character than just the length of the hair.

If you wanted to talk about rosy cheeks and freckles, you could tell us that her face flushed so deeply that the red covered her freckles. That shows us the embarrassment that she’s feeling, the shame, the paleness of the skin, the freckles, and blush all in one sentence.

Use this tactic to weave your descriptions into your story in a way that represents your character more deeply than a surface level description.

How do you like writing character appearance?

Do you use any of these tips and tricks for writing character appearance? How do they work for you?

What other tips would you include in this list? Leave them below!

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