Try using your character’s appearance to allude to. Even with physical description, we want to choose details that will push the story forward, reveal characterization, and show readers what’s hidden.
Storywriting description well how to#
Whenever description is needed, we want to think about how to ‘spend’ our word currency in the best way possible. To avoid disrupting the pace it can be tempting to just give a quick overview of a character’s general features and move on, but unless the character is unimportant to the story, this wastes a valuable opportunity to show-not-tell. If we choose the right details, we open a gateway to great characterization and hook readers at the same time. The rest they can fill in themselves.Įven more important than quantity is the quality, however. Dumps of description of any kind hurt the pace and cause readers to skim, so we should make it our goal to offer enough to point readers in the right direction and then drip in more as needed. We all remember that break-and-enter deviant, Goldilocks, right? Well, to take a page from her book, just like avoiding porridge too hot or too cold, we want to avoid both descriptive sparseness and information overload. Worse, the reader loses confidence in the author’s skills and may be unable to fully suspend disbelief from that point on. Without it, readers may fail to create a mental image and struggle to connect with the character.Īvoiding physical description and leaving it up to the reader will also create a minefield for the writer because if they mention a physical detail (like a character’s pink hair) later on in the story and it clashes with the image the reader has created on their own, well, it breaks the storytelling spell. But including some physical description is also necessary, too. Obviously, we want to start a story with action, pulling readers in by showing what a character is doing and why. So we find ourselves asking, does the character’s looks really matter? Isn’t it what’s inside that counts?
Storywriting description well plus#
After all, at the start of the story when we need to provide details on a character’s appearance, we’re also juggling everything else we must show like the action, setting, circumstances, plus the character’s motivation, underlying problem, emotion, and so on. We may not have a strong mental picture of them ourselves, or if we do, how to sum it all up economically. It’s true, a character’s features and physicality can be hard to convey. But here’s the irony…in all that effort, many of us overlook or underutilize another important area of character description: their physical appearance. Yes, it’s fair to say we work hard to make sure our characters live and breathe on the page. We also revise, dedicating yet more hours to ensure readers understand and care about our characters as much as do. Then, of course, we go on to produce tens of thousands of words about their vulnerabilities and strengths as they rise, fall, and rise again on the path to their goal. We build worlds around our story’s cast, spend dozens of hours plundering their psyche to understand needs, motivations, and beliefs, and even envision complete backstories. I think we can all agree that characters are the heart of a novel.
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