Character Descriptions

Character Description

Almost every story I’ve ever read has contained some sort of character description. Sometimes in a story only the protagonist is described. Other authors provide rich descriptions of all the characters who come to the pages of their writing. I find in looking back over several things that I’ve written that I’m not consistent in the use of physical descriptions of characters.

There are some stories where I barely mention the gender of the characters. In others, I seem to feel that the reader needs to know the most minute elements of the character. It doesn’t seem to matter just how long the story is. Some short stories have descriptions so exact that you could pick the character out of a police line-up. In other cases, full books have characters who are almost invisible, even though they have a major part to play in the story.

I recently was given a copy of a very short story, only 538 words, where the author used about fifty of those words to describe one of the three characters in the story. That’s almost ten percent of the story dedicated to telling you what one of the characters looked like. Was the physical description of the character truly important? Certainly the description of the eyes, was critical to understanding the story, but was the rest of the description that important? Certainly Bob J. thought it was, and he was probably right.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for the works of J.K. Rowling. Alright, I suppose you could say that I’m obsessed with her story of the “boy wizard.” She uses a deft pen to describe her characters that still allows the reader to see each of them in their own mind. I must admit that I appreciate that style of writing. It lets me paint a picture of the character that I can keep throughout the story, or in her case stories. I truly hate it when I see a motion picture that is made from a book, and then read the book afterward. I’m stuck with the picture of the actors in my mind and can’t use the author’s words to visualize the characters. This turns out to be a real pain when the actors and the descriptions of the characters differ widely.

I will admit that in looking back through some of the stories I’ve written, I now think that perhaps I could have been a little more generous with the descriptions. It’s not that I was running short of words, I mean I have a whole dictionary full of them. Not that I’ve used all of them. Think about it, just how often can you describe a person as “quixotic?” Even if you’ve read “Cervantes” it’s hard to imagine someone as quixotic.

Although, it’s a great word to remember if you’re playing “Scrabble.” Not that I play Scrabble all that often. I like to use words but I’m afraid that spelling them has never been my forte. Without that trusty dictionary, and the spell check program on my computer I’d be lost, and writing would take twice as long as it does now, since I would have to spend as much time looking up the correct spelling of words as I would need to place them in a story.

I find it interesting, or perhaps ironic, that in the most published book ever written, the protagonist is never described. That character has been drawn or painted more than any other. You can go throughout Europe and it’s is almost impossible not to find one rendition or another depicting the protagonist somewhere in every town. And yet, in the book there is no mention of what the protagonist looks like. The protagonist is quoted extensively, and there are lengthy descriptions of what the protagonist did, but no words are used to describe the protagonist. As Arte Johnson might have said on “Laugh In,” Very Interesting.